Why do people waste so much time at work?

The point is that this is an entirely separate question.

On a global scale, it's hard to find a worse distribution scheme than the currently used scheme, so any arbitrary distribution is better than the current one (in which the powerful take increasingly more).

There was a human touch to so many of things that surrounded us. People wore beautiful clothes, tended to their houses, put effort in the elaborate rituals of the domestic and public sphere.

I always have to think of that walking around older southern cities in the US. From dainty modest shotguns to gingerbread victorian family homes, to stately mansions, each of them were carefully crafted, using materials pleasant to the touch and sight, with ornamentation that arose naturally, and even though sometimes elaborate, never garrish, always human. And this extended from the large architectural features - the columns and turrets - all the way down to the doorknobs and furniture. I imagine this architecture as an physical manifestation of daily life.

(I could pick any time & place to illustrate this, just nothing after WW1 in the West, when the machine aesthetic took over).

Well-tended gardens, week long festivals and carnivals, washing and mending your Sunday clothes on a lazy Saturday evening, shopping for fresh ingredients and preparing multi-course meals for the family ... These things take time. It requires human effort, something a machine can never replicate, time that somehow we don't have any more, even though productivity is so much more higher than it used to be. Perhaps we are wasting that time doing the ritual of work.

Proposed technological breakthroughs: Self-driving trucks and cars. Warehouse robots. Supermarket robots. Automated drones.

Every efficiency advance not matched by an equal increase in demand reduces the need for people to have jobs.

Yes, of course many people have to work nonsense jobs now or else they'd starve, but that's because we don't have anything like basic income. With basic income, the lack of food and shelter you refer to wouldn't be an issue -- at least for citizens of the country with basic income.

http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Yahiko

If individuals would like to pursue even more (ie the things they want), they should be free to do so, so long as those wants don't occlude the afore stated needs of others.

The interesting thing is that we (humanity) could now actually do this if we wanted to. In the past, the laws of physics (and our lack of knowledge) prevented this. Now only politics do. The "Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery" is real, and it looks like in the end, all it will require to operate is natural resources. We are piss poor at equitably distributing preexisting natural resources amongst ourselves.

Where did you grow up? What were your parents jobs? How much did your parents earn in yearly income? Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food? What do you work as? How much do you currently earn? How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service? Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?

Sillygoose should get whatever they want for playing the game of capitalism the luckiest and the best (but mostly the luckiest), and everybody else who is unluckier or less good should suffer, to provide for all of sillygoose's wants as cheaply as possible, rather than having their own basic needs met.

You wouldn't believe how many people ask me what people would do if they didn't have to work due to guaranteed basic income or some such. Why do I even have to answer that question. People can do whatever they want. It's not my or the systems job to to tell people what to do. If a person is lazy and the only way they can get motivated is by the threat of starving then that's their problem however I would still much prefer to live in a world were people have the option to be lazy and not faced a threat to their basic survival than what we have now where people are highly driven, working multiple jobs, but socio-economic circumstances mean they are trapped in a poverty cycle they can't escape from.

I agree with your premise regarding the workplace providing a way to develop people and to give people a chance to organize around clear goals however I also think this should be decoupled from income stability. Any income earned in the workplace would be a bonus on top of the bare minimum needed to survive which should be provided. How can we say we are civilized when we let people starve, be homeless and deny them access to medical help when they need it because they aren't wealthy enough. The world as it is now is so absurd. Someday (soon I hope) we will look back on this period in human history with bemusement.

This can only happen when you have a working, stable government that is investing in its citizenry, infrastructure, education, etc. What worries me tremendously these days, at least from my US perspective, is that the very definition of "stable income" is constantly changing as income inequality expands and we put in place policies which really only benefit the wealthiest corporations and individuals.

Why? Employers hire people because they, the employers, have goals (possibly very unclear), and their goals require more work than they can do alone as one person, and so they hire people to whom to delegate the work (this can happen recursively). Employers really aren't concerned with personal development or the employee's income as a matter of necessity, only if they happen to be unusually humane and personable, or the labor market happens to be unusually tight.

"But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it.

(if you’re one of those people who sees red every time someone mentions evolution or cavemen, imagine him as a dockworker a hundred years ago, or a peasant farmer a thousand)

Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have. Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/

There's a lot of room for manouver between 'everyone gets exactly the same amount no matter their contribution' and 'everyone must be productive (net-positive on the society) to sustain themselves'.

So, reasons you might contribute when even the sky-gazers can survive at a decent level:

1. Because the extra pay lets you do more fun things

2. Because you enjoy the work

3. Because the extra status you get from your work contributions is rewarding

4. Because you like the people you work with

5. Because you're one of the one in ten thousand people who can leverage the technological progress to make significant contributions, and feel something of a noblesse oblige

6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)

Unsurprisingly this didn't end well.

>If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work.

We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't.

It would take an outbreak of unreasonable optimism to claim this is the most efficient and productive of all possible systems - especially considering it's notorious for its many completely predictable failure modes.

You get your basic income check for X dollars a month. If you work a job, run a business, whatever, in addition to that, you get taxed Y% on your earnings, excluding the basic income amount. No deductions, no write-offs, no tax-shelters. If you wanted to have a progressive sliding scale tax rate, fine, although that makes it more complicated than a flat tax.

HR Block and Intuit would scream, but if you could do your taxes with just your W-2 and a four-function calculator, how many billions of dollars could we avoid wasting and invest in a more productive sector of the economy?

To be clear, the people in the colony barely survived because people lacked the sense of self preservation required to work. You're positing that this occurred because they had to share their output; the tellings I've heard were that the aristocrats wouldn't work until another governer (John Smith) came in and made them work on fear of death.

The idea that anything about this situation was socialist is not well founded. The idea that the terrible outcome is proof positive of anything in particular is not well substantiated. I prefer it as a story of exactly how far the entitlement of the rich goes: those used to controlling the means of production would rather die than give up their positions of privilege. But it's not proof of my ideological position, and it's not proof of yours. It's just anecdata. The rest is just conjecture, not backed up empirically.

With industrial agriculture, 2% of our population is producing the vast majority of our food. With experimental ecology based agricultures, we could see a form of agriculture that takes even less work (it's based on perennials, so you don't have to plant every year) to produce just as much or more. If we can sort out automated recycling we will reach a place where we no longer need to mine. Mass transit on rails just begs for automation and provides people an easy way to get around.

We are shockingly close to a post-scarcity society. Not quite true post-scarcity, where no one needs to work and automation produces all we need, but a society where we very small handful of people can produce enough for the rest of the world.

We'll still need a system that rewards those people, yes, by why punish everyone else? Why force everyone else in working increasingly pointless jobs just because we need to reward the few people actually working necessary jobs? And interestingly enough, we aren't currently rewarding the people working the necessary jobs. If the economy rewarded people according to the importance of their work, farmers would be paid like financial executives.

The other part of this coin is that, while there are absolutely lazy people in the world, there are just as many people who will naturally gravitate towards doing some sort of "work". I would argue that most people would get bored and dissatisfied just sitting on the couch watching television all day. Instead they'll spend their time pursuing their passions. For a lot of people this would probably be "useless" art -- music, theater, fiction, etc. But, hey, if we already have enough people doing the useful things, then why not?

But for others it will be things like science, engineering, invention, and so on. The first several generations of scientists were men and women of leisure. They were wealthy aristocrats who didn't have to work if they didn't want to. But they did work. They choose to work. They choose to do often incredibly monotonous data collection because they were fascinated by the natural world.

There's no reason we couldn't have a world where the vast majority of us are free to pursue whatever we wish. And I'm willing to bet that, in that world, we'd see an explosion of innovation and discovery.

We're far, far beyond needing to strike the earth to get fed each day. The real "producers" are mostly machines which extract value from the earth and process it for end-use. As far as the people who own the machines, they are a mere fraction of the human race... seems a bit silly to accommodate them excessively at the expense of everyone else's well being.

This is a narrative, not a plain fact.

Many people continue to do work without incentive. They feel demotivated, they don't need the money and can go live in mom's basement. They do it out of boredom, even habit or inertia.

Also, it can be difficult to determine people's incentives, they're not always aware of those themselves, so short of telepathy you can't always claim to know whether one is there or not.

Work gets rewarded, but you have enough to survive (but not thrive) even if you choose to do nothing?

I'd be a lot more inclined to be a bigger proponent for incentive based economies if we all started on a level playing field with equal opportunity. The reality is far from it, and we get phenomena like the working poor, millions of people with jobs, sometimes multiple, who can barely scrape by, in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit.

Obviously there has to be a balance in incentives, but I'm inclined to say the US has lost some sense of that balance.

Because most producers simply don't get enough of a margin above subsistence, a wide range of society dosen't have the resources to make investments in new businesses (or new personal investments) and our economic potential suffers. If too much of the economic excess is concentrated into too few hands we end up with an inefficient command economy.

What the BBC article describes to us should strongly hint to us that the current work arrangement is a local maxima in the efficiency of our social/economic system, and that other arrangements should be looked at to yield better social and economic benefits. And honestly, I think that labels such as "Socialism" and "Capitalism" have done a lot of damage in the short-circuiting of analysis of economic systems (ie. in the vein of "This is socialism" we we know that doensn't work...). We really have to move beyond classifying into those broad categories and deciding policy based upon what broad camp one believes in.

Because managers get a malus for allowing too much non-accountable hours for their managees.

Because that's scope creep and it can create the expectation that it's part of my job, so then I'll be responsible for it. Down the line, if one of those misc tasks becomes the ire of someone else and my name is attached to it (comment, commit, etc.), they'll contact me further down the line, perhaps when I'm dealing with something of my own. Then, at least, I have to explain that I don't maintain that and in the worst case (which has happened), I have to fight to not be responsible for it right then.

There's a balance in having your name associated with 'things' in a business. Some people might be good at being a know-it-all, being well-known, and handling everything (why aren't they running their own company?), but you'll increase your chances of interruption the more wide-spread your name is.

This was typical for the first 10 years of my career until I took a lead position. Now I work all the time, and I focus on organizing and coaching up my team so I don't have to do as much.

You can't ignore pleasure and satisfaction of other people when considering a job is useful or not. In the end, those are the goals of anything we do; that the job does it directly rather than indirectly (by say improving industry, which makes life easier, which means people have more free time, which provides happiness/satisfaction) doesn't make it 'bullshit'