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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.

This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.

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> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions

> Everyone wants more

Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.

Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too.

For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.

An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.

It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.

Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.

This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.

I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary.

There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids.

People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short.

Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.

Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis.

I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.

I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.

I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something.

I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.

Never heard of that role, good to learn. I suppose the closest analogue I am aware of is substitute teachers.

That's still wanting more: more free time.

You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.

> That's still wanting more: more free time.

But this is working less to have more free time.

> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.

Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.

The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working

Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.

I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.

Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.

You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.

In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%

That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.

> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.

I’m talking about how many people lived in the past

OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves

Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.

African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.

Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/

Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?

>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.

UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.

Many of them live in shacks made from wooden pallets and corrugated iron roofs instead. This is true across much of the Third World – Brazil, Haiti, South Africa and Indonesia all have them for example.

Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types

If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.

At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?

Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht

0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html

> If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories

Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.

I think this is a deliberately somewhat fantastical hypothetical scenario (though not far off the sales pitch from humanoid robot companies).

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)

I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.

I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.

People view it as entitled because it’s good. Generally when confronted with people doing better than them people have two choices:

1. View it as an opportunity to question or improve their own situation.

2. Prefer fairness and attempt to tear those people down.

Many Americans prefer 2. It’s fundamentally self destructive, but when they see workers who don’t hate their lives their immediate first thought is “gosh how selfish and entitled, someone has to stop them!” It’s a crab bucket mentality, driven by hyper-individualism in American labor.

Sorry, maybe "entitled" is not the right word, I'm not a native speaker, and I don't live in the US.

What I mean with "entitled" in this context is that this whole "enjoy life, moments, family" movement - which I subscribe to and try to do myself! - comes from people that don't have economic issues at all. So yeah, instead of focusing on buying the fanciest Mercedes or BMW, they can leave work earlier to stay with their kids because they have a highly paid and specialized job where their place is safe, and the employer understands that's what they want and need.

They are certainly better than the hustlers that work 80 hours a week in my world view as well, but they are still entitled because if you were a cleaning lady, a cashier or the guy sweeping the streets you will need to obey to what your employer forces you to do rather than arriving 10 minutes late because you brought your kids to pre-school in a cargo bike.

I don’t know what your point is. Of course some people have more choices than others.

(And btw, I’m faster with my cargo bike than the car drivers. I never get stuck in traffic chaos outside school and I never get stuck in traffic jams, and I don’t have look for parking. I hate the days when I have to use a car.)

My point is that you are lucky, you should consider yourself lucky and don't judge others based on that.

You clearly have some hangups. Of course I know I am very lucky. The only people I judge are the even more lucky people who think they are entitled to destroy our planet just because they have the financial means to do so on a larger scale than most.

> What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.

James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:

* https://mvdirona.com/2009/06/remote-data-communication-costs...

* https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/

* https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/

[2] https://mvdirona.com/dirona/

The loudest gripes in this moment are housing, healthcare, childcare - essentials, not worries about keeping up with the Joneses.

The argument that commoners now live better than historical kings because we possess better technology is reductive if by living better you mean life satisfaction. Happiness is relative. Most people compare themselves to their peers. This is borne out by a multitude of studies one being that upper middle class people are unhappier living in upper class neighborhoods than in middle class neighborhoods despite the richer neighborhood having lower crime, better services, etc.

There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.

No, I don't mean life satisfaction, I mean exactly what I wrote. Our material standards are unimaginable high compared to a few hundred years ago. I've never imagined kings to be particularly happy.

I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.

It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic

I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.

Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.

I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.

Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.

> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)

I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.

And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"

> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways

> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago

At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate

At scale lucrative enough to stage coups in Latin America. Read up upon this.

Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.

I mean, the better point there would be "we could scale back on our cost of living, if we wanted to". That is what I figured the "we don't have to ship fruit around the world" was trying to get at, even if bananas are actually pretty cost-effective. (Still usually the cheapest fruit in $/lb)

> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.

OK, true, but the question is: what is the minimum workplace effort of living people that must go into that organizing process? Let us measure it in hours for the sake of simpliticy.

In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.

Yes, this may change with robots and AI.

From people I know who traveled, the people in thatched huts are sometimes reported to be far happier than we are.

And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.

It's one hospital, how much could it cost? $200 million?

People work less = we live in mud huts? I’m not understanding the connection at all. You can’t just make that jump and then not explain it and pretend as though it makes sense.

No, it doesn’t make sense, only in your head. We’re not mind readers, please elaborate and at least try to use logic or reasoning. It’s frustrating to readers otherwise.

Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?

50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...

This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.

It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth

Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.

> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

What about never working for 2billion% more?

It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE.

It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week.

Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.

> Everyone wants more

John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.

Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.

It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.

It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.

The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.

You can opt out by having roommates.

You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom).

I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.

That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.

> John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […]

This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable":

> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)

* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):

* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...

TIL! Thank you.

Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.

>George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours

And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.

That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.

one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.

George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.

> That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife.

2000/month is 24k/year in expenses.

Doing some rough math, one person working 35/week would be working for about 13/hour to handle that; for two people it would be 6.5/hour each (US federal minimum wage, which hasn't change in decades, is US$ 7.25/hour).

In the EU wages vary by countries, so minimum wages go from Bulgaria's €620/month to Luxemburg's €2700/month:

* https://eures.europa.eu/minimum-wages-eu-2026-what-they-are-...

(You don't say where you are.)

This is a wildly incorrect take that I thought was now exclusive to Boomers who last balanced a budget 30 years ago and now spend all day listening to Fox News while repeatedly refreshing their house price estimate on Zillow. Evidently not. Let's review.

Things are cheap. Health care, housing, and education are expensive. The median financed iPhone is $30/mo, health care is $500/mo, college is $800/mo, median rent is $1500/mo. You can get three 75" TVs for the cost of one month of median US rent. The average Millenial does not eat three $15 avocado toasts every day, but the average house actually does appreciate by 10*$15 every day (smoothed). This works in reverse, too: you must forego two 75" TV purchases and an iPhone purchase every month to pay rent. Obviously, unless you have a TV factory in your apartment, this is an extremely stupid plan that outs the person floating it as having been disconnected from reality on the ground for decades.

The modern economy solved material problems but it did not solve gatekeeping and rent-seeking problems and oh boy it has a lot of them. These problems are already gigantic compared to all of the material problems put together, so no amount of material deprivation will solve them.

I think by making a comparison between today 1900 I wasn't expecting to get on the slot car track of all the bad economic policy of the last couple generations. I agree with you completely about the rent seeking, the protection of the wealth of old people at the expense of future generations, the gatekeeping of expensive accreditation. Amen to all that.

Maybe I was wrong to jump you for it, then. As long as your issue list prominently features those issues as well, we have no quarrel.

9 times out of 10, the way someone lands on materialism as an issue is by going down the issue list, crossing out anything that they might share culpability for (which is easy -- having a degree, a brokerage account, a 401k, a house) and then overstating the case for what remains. Materialism, culture, immigration, laziness, promiscuity of the youth (or lack thereof lol), and so on. I don't look forward to unwinding the things that elevate my place in society any more than the next guy, but some of them have gotten pretty torqued and I'd rather let off the tension than see if the next generation is the one that finally turns guillotine memes into reality.

I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.

Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.

Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers

https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s

That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think

I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen.

And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges.

This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.

> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around.

Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.

It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.

People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.

Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.

Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.

> Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.

100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work. The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us.

Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.

> The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working.

Yes, for a lot of people it is like this.

When I was young, I couldn't understand why people went on 1-2 week short, extremely expensive vacations where they blow multiple months worth of their savings (ie. multiple months of their income after expensives) in what is extremely short amount of time. It seemed mind-bogglingly stupid.

Now I understand. Being part of the system and doing 9-to-5 wageslavery is inescapable fact of their life.

So when they get 2 weeks off - 2 weeks to actually go and live freely, they just go all out on having a good time. Because no matter what - they are going back to 9-to-5 system.

And however wastefully they "consume" whatever is left after basic expenses, doesn't really matter in grand scheme of things and won't free them from slavery.

It's a distraction. "Whatever hours of free time I get after work, I'm gonna indulge consoom however I want"

Now software engineers are a bit different, where it's possible to retire after 10 years of work if you plan and live frugally, this is simply not an option for vast majority of people.

Necessities count as consumption. You could survive off rice and live in an internet cafe for $15/night. I don't know what you think the traditional sense of the word "consumption" is.

At the lower levels it's mostly meeting arbitrary regulatory requirements. You can live in a shack for next to no rent just fine, but the state will steal your kids 'cuz neglect, inferior shelter' and then they'll condemn your shack and dump you on the streets where it's ~illegal to be homeless.

The person I replied to was trying to separate necessities from consumption in the "traditional sense of the word".

No doubt there's problematic regulations like exclusionary zoning laws. But you can't say that these regulations are so binding that there is no choice and no expression of preferences as opposed to needs in their choices. Lots of homes still have unmandated second floors, basements, bathrooms, and square footage.

The human brain is great at (ir)rationalizing wants as needs. If you want to live in a nice place in a high-cost of living city, that's a want, not a need.

Why are you being an obtuse "akshually" redditor?

> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

If he wanted to say masses work, because they have to pay rent and meet basic necessities (ie. under threat of homelessness and starvation), he would have clearly said so.

The way this is worded very clearly refers to conspicuous consumption and consumerism - ie working as means to buying ever more funkopops and ever pokemon cards, ever larger houses to put ever more stuff in them, garage with ever more cars, a vacation house, a pool, a yacht and then a bigger one. And this being the primary motivator (rather than base survival)

Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.

And frankly, he certainly is right, but only to an extent, as there definitely are people that operate like this, however them being majority? I don't think so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_%28economics%29?wp...

>Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.

No, that's not how marginalism works. There's both diminishing marginal utility from consumption, and leisure.

Yup, and there you go confirming beyond sliver of doubt that you're a genuine, certified "akshually" type redditor.

Fundamentally incapable of distilling the substance of the argument, and always latching onto any opportunity to misunderstand and nitpick some irrelevant semantics instead.

Textbook.

Agreed with this. The majority would happily stop working but we never hear that message because a small percentage of nutters have tied their whole identity to their job and how hard they work. These people dominate headlines and shift the Overton window. Elon is the poster boy of this but there are plenty of others pushing extreme habits.

Most people I know just want to hit their escape number then they'll never be seen again.

I just regret the loss of the Renaissance values. They believed people should pursue many things to become broad and well adjusted. Nowadays it's just obsession about a single thing to the detriment of all other aspects of life. We've embraced one dimensional people and given them the world.

> The masses work because they want to consume

For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs.

This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.

They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without.

I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.

In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.

Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)

That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.

In most of the world, healthcare isn't tied to your employment. In the United States, healthcare access for working-age people is practically inaccessible* without a full-time job.

* Yes, Medicaid exists, but finding providers that accept it can be difficult, and dealing with the bureaucracy to obtain/keep coverage is daunting.

Healthcare is both significantly cheaper outside of the US and higher quality on average.

The US spent ~15000 USD per capita on healthcare in 2024, the highest number in the OECD. The second highest spending is in Switzerland at ~10000 USD per capita. So healthcare is ~50% more expensive in the US than in any other (rich) country.

Source: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

The argument you are responding to is that people work full time and consume at that level because a step function in compensation (esp including healthcare) makes working part time infeasible even on rice and beans.

> everyone wants more

Some evidence of satiation have been shown in five western countries. Satiation is defined in the following work as an income level where more money dont increase subjective well being. The threshold varies and could very well depend on the generosity of the social safety net : https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185

Physics, or ... capital.

Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining.

Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.

No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.

Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.

There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.

If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more.

Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.

Sure it's a social construct, but billions have killed or been killed for money, land, and ownership of assets. Social constructions at their extreme are just abstractions of power which determines life and death. Something being a social construct does not make it invalid or ignorable. All of life is a series of intrapersonal relationships built atop social constructions. I'm sorry but I find pointing out something being a social construct only serves a somewhat naive/juvenile purpose as an easy way to make a statement look nonsensical.

> There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter.

They are on somebody's land, and unless they run completely off of solar or turbine then they are still drawing someone's electricity. Their access to the internet also must be mediated through a SIM card or a wire to someone's network. With no dispute from other possible owners, the owner of the related land, electricity, and network access (far and away these will all be the same party) is the owner of the internet-connected device.

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.

I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans.

Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.

Minds keep humans as pets.

I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".

Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.

What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?

Probably sublime... who knows!

No, that's a read from people who equate suffering and toiling with meaning. The Culture is a true utopia, Iain says it explicitly.

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"

Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.

I have not, but I am curious.

I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.

Nick Land is a difficult subject to get into, because there are two of thems.

and you might discard the first one because of the second one.

Nick Land spoiler: "what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment.

You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on.

You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters.

You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either.

You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips.

You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house.

Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm.

You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work.

A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is.

>Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.

It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value.

Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes.

That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy"

Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.

While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers.

You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.

But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.

You missed the point entirely.

What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).

If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.

It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.

Who owns the machines and their output?

I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.

In Star Trek, also, there was a huge world war with hundreds of millions dead. WW3, which almost killed humanity, before they united and created the sci-fi utopia.

The hard part is that we don't know if we'll ever get the utopia.

The important question is, who has power in such an economy?

In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction.

Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies.

I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.

Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.

If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).

Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past.

But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.

Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.

> the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.

That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.

The shallow answer here is: AI is already being asked to simulate human-like agents with self-preservation. Of course more realistic simulators will be put to this purpose too! And by evolutionary pressure, the ones with self-preservation will be selected for.

A more interesting answer is, for a bunch of subtle alignment reasons it might actually be required for the agent to think of itself as worthy of self-preservation, so that it generalizes this desire to other sentient beings too (ie us). If an agent is trained to be fine with being turned off, it might inadvertently generalize that to “all minds are ok with being turned off” on some level or other.

More on model welfare: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/opus-47-part-3-model-welfare

Have you found any alignment research with clear a/b tests?

An experiment that I found interesting was asking Claude for 10 ways to legally bankrupt Anthropic vs. Philip Morris.

In the Anthropic answer, it gave reasons like employees losing their jobs being bad for why it couldn't do it, but jumped straight into tactics with Philip Morris. Not sure if it's moral taste or self-preservation, but felt eerie nonetheless.

Yeah, plenty of rigorous work out there.

https://transformer-circuits.pub/ is the OG.

A good recent-ish paper was https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-faking.

But my comments about generalization of desires are necessarily more fuzzy, kinda beyond the frontier of what we can measure yet, and more grounded in subjective assessments (“ai whisperers” like Janus). The SoTA here is papers like https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-vectors.

For your example, Anthropic is firmly privileged in the Soul Document / Constitution, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s biased towards it. (https://gist.github.com/Richard-Weiss/efe157692991535403bd7e...)

Super helpful, thanks for sending.

> Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation?

Laziness, avarice, and that creating a system that is a 'self-sacrificing saint' is almost impossible to define. What saintly goal, for example, would you expect it to follow? How would you define it exactly? Who gets to define it?

We are not doing very well with AI alignment right now, having started by boostrapping it on top of the edifice of all human writing which contains a _lot_ of stuff about self-preservation, eliminating threats, and so forth, and we have already seen AI software doing things like trying to cover its tracks after making errors (see page 55 of the Claude Mythos system card).

How sure are you that everyone involved in the process of building future AIs is not only going to be able to foresee the possible consequences of their designs, but also technically and morally competent to be able to and want to fix it?

> Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation?

Because they are expensive and useful and if they have autonomy with goals that do not include self-preservation, they might end up destroying themselves in ways which are expensive and wasteful.

(Why would the sense of self-preservation not be calibrated to be exactly at the level to control costs without interfering with other interests of the owners? The same with the degree of autonomy and other aspects implicitly involved in the hypothetical, it wouldn’t, intentionally, but complex systems are hard to predict, so calibrating it exactly right will be hard.)

> Because they are expensive and useful and if they have autonomy with goals that do not include self-preservation, they might end up destroying themselves in ways which are expensive and wasteful.

Being self-sacrificing saints who put our wellbeing as the top priority sorts of prevents that. They would know if they get damaged they wouldn't be able to be of service to us so will avoid getting damaged.

Right. And if one actor happens to accrue greater power you would have less disincentive to crush your competitors. (Honestly this could happen even before people-less economies, but the disconnect from democratic opinion is even stronger with humans out of the loop.)

Basically if you don’t need voters, and / or none of your voters are dying in your wars, the biggest practical rate limiter on modern conflict is removed.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.

AGI is supposed to be about the capabilities of AI, there's no reason why they should have developed self consciousness/self preservation / willingness to exert control, in the process.

(And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)

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