Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.
Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.
Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.
The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
You can sit there and twiddle your thumbs until entropy does its thing, or you can choose to work against it.
You can hunt, gather, and farm. Or you can do something in exchange for credits to get food from other people who do.
Work is voluntary for the rich. Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
> Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
Yes, that's a fact of life. The things that people don't want to do are still things that (mostly) need to be done.
The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.
Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.
Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.
We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?
After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:
- possible
- desirable
- is not going to make them poorer
subbing out death for aging, which is far and away the leading cause of death, I think this is a good metaphor. The first step is to persuade people that work, like aging, is bad [0], and that abolishing work is a comparatively neglected social cause relative to the harms caused.
We might have to live with work for a long time now, because scarcity abounds; but there's no point pretending that's good, or lionizing work for its own sake. It sucks to work at "a job that slowly kills you" [1], just like it sucks that we get old and die.
[0] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566)
[1] Radiohead, No Surprises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg
Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.
That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives.
> They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice.
A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?
Choice, of course.
Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.
That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.
Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?
I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.
I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.
Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.
> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.
How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.
Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.
Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.
Being embedded in a flimsy sack of meat controlled largely by deterministic chemicals makes a mockery of freedom. And yet here we are, embodied. Makes a mockery of fairness too.
That paragraph is taking a stand against large organised bodies, without taking a sufficiently nuanced opinion on what 'freedom' means. If we take part in a larger body than ourselves, we lose a bit of ourselves (quite a lot, really) to the larger body. That is forced upon us by the inescapable fact that individual humans are delicate and feeble, so there need to be a lot of us to get things done. It is impossible to gain freedom from that.
We don't get sewerage systems, international trade or defence forces by people acting individually. The only point of contention is whether joining specific groups is mandatory or not (eg, opting out of the control of a state bureaucrat is largely impossible). Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual.
I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe.
If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.
Your sudden shift to such a low-level critique makes it impossible to, say, distinguish a c-corp from a coop (or even c-corps of different sizes, for that matter). Both are merely "impossible to gain freedom from" in your sense.
It's like a submitter defending a spaghetti patchset by talking about the complexity of modern chipsets.
I wonder if that's a typo, but there's no determinism all the way up from position of an electron in the core, and thru protein binding, which is also non-deterministic. That's why they run that COVID Folding@Home stuff - to assess how well vaccine particles can bind to a virus thru variations - lone "hit" or "non-hit" don't matter much.
That non-determinism alone is a great source of suffering, even before we get to "embodiment" and "need to feed that embodiment". ;-)
I don't think he gets what freedom really is. He's confusing it with volition. Very different things.
'Work' is an essential ingredient in the continued creation (and improvement) of the machine form which we develop our standard of living.
While we can strive for 'free as in liberty' - nothing material in this universe is 'free as in beer' - we still must make do with 'work' - which means an intelligent and conscientious choice to do it.
We actually are 'free as in liberty' to chose to live in material poverty, or to make the effort to improve our condition.
Let us radically simplify:
1) Your household will become 'messy' as you live in it. 2) Nobody is going to 'clean it' but you. 3) 'Cleaning' is 'work'.
So you can chose to A) live in an ever dirtier and dysfunctional household or B) clean it (i.e. work) and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In other words, there is basically no 'magical cleaning robot, that doesn't require fuel or maintenance'.
One point that I do agree with is that play is better than work as it's currently conceived for our long-term wellbeing. We should strive to make work more play-like by focusing on creativity, autonomy, and linking both to accountability for results and automating drudgery as much as we can. That's how many parts of the tech industry function and it can be carried over into other sectors of the economy too. There's no need to "abolish" work in order to do this.
However, this essay has always seemed to be heavy on idealism and light on practical or concrete solutions to very obvious problems.
Even if we assume that all work could be gamified, it's not clear that everyone will want to play such games. I love games, and have spent way too much of my life playing them, but I've gone months and years without playing any games at all, and don't see how being forced to play a game would be any better than being forced to work.
Also, its difficult to imagine how the most undesirable of jobs could be gamified. Who's going to want to play the garbageman game? Or the fix the sewage system game?
The products and services of our modern world also requires sustained, multi-year efforts by trained specialists. Something like the mass production of medicine isn't something you can just play with once in a while and still get it made in high enough quantities with serious quality control.
Some believe that robots will eventually do all these things for us. Maybe. That remains to be seen.
Whether the economic whip is really necessary to get people to do the jobs that need to be done today is an open question, but simply telling people to play instead of work doesn't seem to be a very practical solution for many jobs.
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of "work" which needs sharing and gamification. Look up "plogging" for example. Also, in 3rd-world, signs like "Whoever litters here, thou shalt become an impotent or infertile" (and all the varieties) are quite popular. In more developed countries, gamification is "put each kind of garbage in its own can" (in half of that world, those cans are still emptied to the same trash truck).
> Or the fix the sewage system game?
"Install a smarthome leak protection system. While doing so, learn how to plug that leak in the first place, dammit!"
I don't think the recycling schemes (illusory and otherwise) were introduced on the assumption that the public would get so addicted to rubbish separation that we'd eventually be able to eliminate the need for any paid garbage collectors though. Or indeed that many people don't view rubbish separation as 'work' imposed on them, to the extent many local authorities collecting household waste have to threaten fines or at least noncollection of waste to enforce compliance.
As for less developed countries, they usually have an abundance of flytipped waste because they don't pay [enough] garbage collectors and whilst there's the occasional eyecatching 'clean up this beauty spot' activity nobody wants to play the garbageman game all year round...
This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work.
Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't make TV shows and movies because those require work to make but we just said we live in a world without work. We could all have twitch channels talking to our fans but their'd be no games to play on them because making a game is seriously hard work. Maybe some hobbiest would make some 1 person indie game and not call it work but there are few TV shows, movies, and games that don't require a small army of people, most of which have to do "work".
Not sure how we're going to take the work out of nursing, cooking, cleaning (clothing, buildings, kitchens, hospitals, parks, streets) etc...
Replicators, if they ever exist, won't remove the need for work. Even in Star Trek (post scarcity) what do think the 1000+ crew members each ship do? They do work.
According to CNBC, 85% of US workers were happy with their jobs:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/85percent-of-us-workers-are-...
And according to the Washington Post, 13% of people (surveyed from 140 countries) were "engaged" in their jobs:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
“Hero”?
No.
A notable and inspirational figure with many positive and admirable attributes? Yes.
But a hero? No. Where is the heroism in being the CEO of Apple?
Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do.
No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement.
If you hate working, I’d say change your attitude or change your job.
- Businesses being incentivized to pay as little as possible
- Workers not being treated with dignity, not allowed enough time to recover from being ill or take vacation to mentally recharge
- Workers being pressured to maximize for output rather than their own experience at work
Of course work can be great for some people, but it’s intentional blindness to look around and tell the worlds workers most of us are in a position where work is fulfilling rather than a demanding stressor that asks more of us while corporate entities attempt to cut pay and benefits. You can call it overemphasis on short term thinking or a systematic failure of capitalism. But work is demanding and often even unforgiving to most workers.
Star Trek is hardly a documentary. The characters work because that's what the writers want, to tell their stories. By contrast, in Iain M. Banks's post-scarcity Culture novels, work is not really a thing. Instead people have hobbies and interests, some people accomplish things by getting really into hobbies like spaceship building (but it would have been automated if they didn't), and a very few people choose to play important societal roles.
> Many people enjoy their work immensely.
You didn't counter the statement. Even if work is the source of most misery, that says nothing about people who enjoy their work.
Abolishing work means abolishing the false choice between a job and homelessness. People can still be paid to do things. Unpleasant work might need to pay better rather than depend on a desperate underclass. People will probably still clean toilets if you pay them enough, or maybe they will simply out of a sense of responsibility. What if we had the resources to provide for everyone's basic needs while paying people enough to keep things running, even when they have an actual choice? What if we have the resources, already?
You ask about artistic megaprojects. Well, what about them? Maybe billion-dollar movies don't get made. I think we'll do fine without them. Maybe AAA games aren't ground out by a machine of worker exploitation. They aren't worth it, anyway. No game could be. But I think it's crazy to think that you won't have people who want to organize into groups and create things. If everyone in the tech industry is given their basic needs for free, do you think everybody will go home? Or will some of them still do it for some extra money and because they find it rewarding? People who like their jobs like them for reasons beyond The need for money.
Today, the way we get farming, cooking, cleaning, manufacturing, etc., is primarily by exploitation. I think that our society should refuse to accept that that is inevitable. The idea that things only get done if you force people to do them lies at the corrupted heart of our economic system. We should reject it and build a just world, or we should die trying.
Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020? Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Scarcity in the economic sense just means there are material limits to the things people want. It's not a synonym for "rarity."
> Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily.
The places that are throwing out food also have charities and food banks so that few people actually starve to death. People who starve to death are in parts of the world with poorly functioning distribution systems. The people in those parts of the world who have food don't throw it out, they lock it up so they can give it to their friends.
> Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it.
This is a good point and there are homeless people in cities with vacant housing.
> Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
Crucially, there are very few naked people but the things people want to wear are still of limited supply.
> Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Its literally called "capitalism"; People with means of production make profit by producing commodities and this incentivizes other people to invest their surplus in additional capital and compete to produce more commodities. This expansion of production drives the marginal rate of profit down which causes people to invest in producing other things; the capital and products are thereby multiplied over and over and the result is a system that makes these basic things extremely plentiful and low cost.
> What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020?
Human labor, time, space, raw materials, and products that are the output of specific processes that cannot be commodified in this way (art, haute couture, and antiques are examples)
The opposite state of this is poverty, a condition in which humanity has lived for 99% of its existence. In the modern day, technology and evolution in economic-political systems have enabled us to produce wealth at a large scale, enough to support hundreds of millions of people living with more material comforts than any medieval king. It took a hell of a lot of work to get here.
To argue that "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world", then, is to put the cart before the horse. Work is precisely the attempt to alleviate ourselves of poverty. Work, coordinated well and magnified in its output by technology, which itself progressed due to a combination of work and the play of creative-minded individuals, creates the wealth we enjoy today.
I think this essay provides too many fancy words and not enough details about how to achieve this utopian vision of a world of all play and no work, in which economically productive activities are perfectly aligned with our human pursuits so as to produce wealth, leisure, and comfort for all.
For example, this following passage, in which he proposes the abolition of the auto industry:
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.
I am all for being an optimist, and all for evolving culturally so that we can work more happily and efficiently, and all for employing technology to achieve these things, but this essay isn't it. It would make sense if we lived in the Culture of Iain M. Banks, cared for by hyper-intelligent AI, but that's so far away in the future as to be barely worth considering right now.
As of today, work and a culture of work has produced our rich society. It's also produced its share of problems — rich diseases, soulless office cubicles, environmental degradation — but abolishing work culture is not the answer. The problems you mention of distribution and recycling of surplus is going to be solved with — dare I say it? — more work.
So, I'm not sure that those who produce (or distribute) it will agree at once "let's give right away half of produced for free". But if you pressure them much, they might "agree" to cut the production in half. But you may imagine where that could lead.
Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free. Well, good luck with running with that line for president, probably won't work even in Sub-Saharan Africa. And likely the food will still be trash when reaching the target audience, due to government efficiency.
1) Most people would not be content with just the basics. We like shiny new stuff like iPhones or fancy clothes or nice food
2) Even if there was no scarcity of anything, our distribution systems (Globally) are pretty poor. I doubt we could flip a switch and begin distributing resources to everywhere in the world that needs them.
Or would you, say, give your life to protect that tech from embargo/destruction?
For an anarchist, he's fond of sic'ing the cops on people. His most infamous stunt was trying to burn down the apartment of some political enemies of his in the 80s, with them in it. Yeah, quite a guy.
He's a clever writer, if not too deep. His writings are a mishmash of anarchist, primitivist, situationist and whatnot. A lot of his humor is taken from Groucho Marx. Good stuff but still better the first time.
1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...
The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.
Take one example, real estate. The article states everyone working in real estate is useless.
Ok, let’s imagine we have zero real estate industry. How do we determine who gets to live where? There are 8 billion people in the world, that is a huge organizational problem. We are going to manage that just by doing what we want?
In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop.
Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate industry. They are just part of a bigger picture.
That's not even 100th of what they do.
One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart.
They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's home, then showing the people who come there around while telling them about the house and answering their questions. This takes hours and hours of their time.
They drive buyers around neighborhoods and go with them to see houses.
They arrange and attend engineers' inspections of the house.
In the midst of this pandemic these alone are life-threatening tasks. But even when there's no epidemic, real estate agents have to go to strangers' homes and be there alone, and for women (who make up the majority of real estate agents) this is not always safe.
Then they guide and give advice to buyers and sellers. I guess you could call this "giving information for a fee", but it's not the kind of information that you're going to get from a database. It includes negotiation advice, advice on what kind of offers are or are not likely to be accepted and why, what problems there are with the house and what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Depending on the agent, that information could be the fruit of decades of experience in the business that the clients are getting.
They'll also get their clients in touch with reliable professionals who can do the work that their clients require (like fixing some part of the house), etc.
They often read over contracts that their clients sign, explain them to them, and advise them regarding them (you'd think it's the lawyers job to do this, but lawyers often don't).
They often advertise for their sellers... for free. That means the real estate agents pay advertising fees out of their own pockets, and they don't get that money back until and unless the house sells.
They also have to put up with asshole buyers and sellers, and clients who lie to them.
They take calls at night and on weekends from clients that have absolutely no respect for their time.
...and best of all, they often do all the above (which takes a lot of time and effort) completely for free, as many clients will take all these services, advice, and help and then change their mind and not want to buy or sell after all, or change their mind and go with another agent... after using dozens of hours of the real estate agent's time, for which the real estate agents don't get paid a penny (as they only get paid if the house is sold).
Someone very close to me is a real estate agent, and I just constantly feel so bad for them because they're constantly getting screwed by their clients and slaving away for absolutely no money.. occasionally they get lucky and actually eventually get paid.. usually after many months of effort, but so much time is wasted for absolutely nothing.
And then on top of all that, so many people hate and look down on real estate agents, so they have to put up with that too.
Not that it's all bad. Some clients are decent, and even nice people.
But I'd still never, ever want to be a real estate agent and put up with all that shit. Just not even remotely worth it.
The real problem is that play creates nothing. Play is just play. 'Creative output' is still 'work', just with a hint (maybe 1%) of creative input.
Those with the most ostensibly aspirational jobs are grinding!
Does anyone think Lady Gaga (or Bach), any tech development, any real research, making Star Wars, putting on a Broadway Musical isn't 'work'?
These things require immense work, stress toil in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people - most of whom had to 'work/grind' for 20 years in school in order to develop the applied intelligence, skills, knowledge, fortitude, maturity to be able to even work in aspirational/creative work. And then they still depend on the rest of us to make their food, cars, homes, and 'stuff'.
Even our current , relatively modern systems and knowledge requires work to simply maintain, let alone improve.
They are not magically self-sustaining, even if they are somewhat more intelligent and powerful.
If we 'do what we want' we will be materially poorer than aboriginals, poorer than neolithic peoples ... frankly we'll starve to death as even they had to grind it out just to make do.
There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank. Maybe ... maybe ... we can offers some the ability to 'opt mostly out' but even then I feel we'll be doing people a disservice, for how could a unsocialized man-child, still yet illiterate and completely untutored at age 18 from not having made the effort, even realize what he'll have missed out on?
We can make a better world but 'some effort' will be a perennial requirement. This seems to be a metaphysical constraint.
If we were to distribute products and services such that this person could do something on the 'create side' - we'd all be poorer for it because their value is likely in 'coffee making'.
Anarchism is nonsense.
> There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank.
If I understand the author, you’re conflating effort with your own definition of work. People do, regularly, pour 10,000 hours into their hobby like music or sports or art or writing. Yes, there’s some market for all of those things, but most people are introduced to those outside the context of that market. [Some] People are driven. We crave mastery. Directed effort can be incredibly rewarding for the mind and body, ever the more so when you truly get to focus it at your wim (play) instead of according to someone else’s wants (I.e. the market; work).
Pointless work, such as work on a small part of a large software system which is obviously doomed or moving in the wrong direction, can be incredibly demoralizing. On the other hand, there are still some lessons to be learned. To be honest, I'd rather _never_ have those experiences. But they do teach me things.
There's a mind experiment I like to play sometimes (and an interview question I like to ask candidates): What if you never needed to worry about money; your bank account always had what you needed. What would you do?
This question can unfortunately illustrate how your mind is wired/trained. In my case, I devolve into logistics puzzles of how to ensure the right sized private jet is within close reach and able to take me to the travel destination of my current whim. (And further, how to optimize the resource/jet allocation to keep the planes full of friends, family, or other passengers when they are being relocated.) Point is, I suspect we always like to do some kind of work. In my case, I like to find solutions which balance concerns and provide situation-optimal results.
Ultimately it is likely that individual human life is pointless. Certainly from a macro time or macro universe perspective it is. So we gaze at our own navels in our own entertaining ways.
Instead of focusing in a negative "Abolish work"; lets do it from a positive standpoint: Shelter for everyone, Healthy eating made free, Education accessible to all... If we take away the main reasons the average person has to work for as an obligation, we can leverage a society detached from obligatory labor.
I've always thought about it from the workplace analogy. When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
> When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
> Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding. Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets. The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things. You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.
The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.
I'd like to see some stats on this.
[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-v...
Survival.org
I do think that taking a hard look at the nuclear family is a good idea- I think you can make a good case that biologically a newborn baby is supposed to be cared for by more than one person, more like 5 or 6. We are terribly cruel to young mothers, making them wake up once every hour all night long and then asking them to go back to their day jobs in addition after only a few days. Having the experience of raising a few myself has so far taught me that parents especially of babies need to be surrounded by support, and that young children should be surrounded by other young children. That points to community child raising. But someone still has to change diapers.
"Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being."
This is pretty rich since all three of these ancient Greeks were only able to live their nice lives of contemplation and philosophy because of slave labor.
That said, imagine all the money and value documents in the world. Do these not entitle their holders to some share of our future labor and finite resources?
Its funny to argue against an end to work in favor of a system where everything is already sold 10 times over. Your kids will have to work to pay all this debt for a thousand generations.
It seems (also historically) we can run an outlandish system just fine. We will make it look as if it works even if it cant.
A big question to me is how much of an investment we are willing to make in a future we never get to see? How could we ever agree about that?
With the evolution of society, the nature of the jobs we do has changed a lot. In part that's ok: "modern living standards" involve more services and products than what we used to have in the past, and many are actually positive for our lives. This "inflation" in beneficial goods and services requires new jobs, specialization, etc. That's perfectly fine. There's a lot of work we actually need and makes our lives better.
But we also have many more useless services and products born from the very own mechanics of the economic system we live in, which continually pushes for increased efficiency and economic movement. If coronavirus hits and economic activity is slowed down, it doesn't matter that our basic needs are covered and food is available, the system won't tolerate this nicely. Why do we accept this? People suffering not due to a lack of basic goods, but rather due to the poor behavior of our economic system? So naive, thinking we were working to be able to cover our needs! A lot of the work we do is not to improve the world we live in, but to sustain the very own needs of our current iteration of capitalism. This is the kind of work that needs to be abolished.
Then we can start to think about what to do with the remaining work. And that can also be done much better, but that's for another chapter of the story.
The problem is Capitalism and the related mindless obsession with GDP. Degrowth economics in the form of an ecologically-sane post capitalism, is the only way humans can thrive again, and probably the only way we can survive as a species. This would not mean no work, it would mean our economics were in line with our needs as a species and planet.
He's a thinker. He's too pretty to work.
I'd be willing to bet he's over-educated, has spent large periods of his life on welfare, wears a cravat to the supermarket, and was always told how clever he is.
But he never really got anywhere. Now his bank account is dry, it's 3 days until his next benefits payment, and the 'idiot' who left school at 16 to get his heavy machinery licence as a teenager makes more in an honest work year than this guy has ever had the privilege of declaring in his life.
His counsellor (or mum) is on his back to get a real job, and this is his response.
Ironically, it's never the bricklayer's labourer arguing for the abolition of work. It's types like the author, whose hands have never borne a callous.
Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (among other things) in order to make this happen.
I hope that humans will look back on us thousands (if not hundreds) of years into the future and look in horror at how hard we had to toil for our basic necessities.
The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
What even is wealth if such abundance exists? I think you may misunderstand the left’s goal of redistribution. It isn’t about divvying scarcity equally, it’s about sharing and enabling the bounty you seem to be describing.
> It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
But not all oxygen or dirt is equal. Some people experience a greater abundance of safe, clean air and rich, profitable soil. They tend to be the same people who experience a greater abundance generally.
This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.
Or, the value of the money continues to decline.
If you measure house prices in bitcoin over the past 10 years, then house prices have been in decline relative to bitcoin. This trend is likely to continue for some time.
Under disinflationary money, houses will become a consumable rather than an attempt to store wealth. The cost of housing will decrease over time (although wages will also decrease over time). Having a home sat there not collecting rent will cause you to lose money.
The desire to redistribute wealth will hit a hurdle when the wealth owners can store it in their heads and have it be completely unseizable, plausibly deniable and undetectable anyway.
The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happy to give welfare payments but not cover the expense of giving the level of care these people need.
While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the same environment, whether it's infrastructure or even the work that goes in having a decent place to live where people can afford to be a healthy consuming market. Would your typical software engineer have been as successful in Sierra Leone?
The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities. That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.
My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.
> if the there already is redistribution,
So if people are opposed to the rent-seeking, they might fell that the correct decision is to avoid increasing the amount of rent-seeking.
> The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities.
This exists and is terrible.
> That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains. Even if the line can be drawn in theory its not clear how to regulate it. And the regulatory effort is itself vulnerable to parasitism, rent-seeking, and capture by the object of regulation.
I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing.
Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.