Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Sounds like something we need to fix then.
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
That alone would be a massive win.
What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
"Thiel's Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech" [2024] https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Ironically, that's the saved copy hosted by Palantir itself...
I got this feeling looking at the (non)word cantine.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
It wouldn't be too hard I don't think. Avoid having employees by making everything a short term contract / gig style work
You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
You're in a super small bubble if you think earning equity in your employer's company is standard.
Justify it based on the risk of the labor market and your work done.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
See that 50-90% and 90-99%?
That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money.
Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class.
If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no publication has ever published this chart?
The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
It is just too much.
Last time when link between work and material comfort was disconnected was communism.
It looked good on paper from 1920's perspective, but was a downward spiral.
If we are to be functioning society, people need motivation to do their best ... and then, there's some spare wealth for the unfortunate.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
Take that capitalist pig!
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
I don’t think anyone is advocating to provide a free ride for capable individuals
Of course someone has to produce/work harder — and the parent is arguing that there is already more than enough extra
Unless the capable individuals control a lot of capital - then free-riding is expected via the "Job-creator exception clause"
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...
What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%
- Social Security: 23%
- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%
- National Defense: 13%
And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.
Then get ready to be a slave, bc noone, absolutely noone gives things for free, which is, in my view, reasonable.
Why would I believe this?
What happens when labour-based production is fully replaced by automated factories? Then ?
The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.
Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.
My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.
One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.
This cruel system has to end.
Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly.
There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required.
Your naivety only exacerbates the cruelty.
Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded.
either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth.
land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)
Cognitive dissonance, they understand but refuse to admit it because it conflicts with their world view.
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors
Just replace investors with tax payers.
Many young people feel like they are going to pay into SS for 50 years to pay for the older generations and then when they retire they are going to receive less than they paid in. Obviously that may or may not be the case, but there is a general feeling that they are being gypped in order to pay for the older generation's retirement that they will not get themselves.
Look up when benefits began to be paid. The current payments very much and by design pay for the current retirees. The idea that this is some kind of elaborate “scam” when it is one of those things that every other civilized country has figured out is hilarious. Go travel. Go talk to some retirees there. Turn off the Fox News.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.