Why do we assume everyone should be working?
wilsoniumite.com> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff”
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
I interpreted that to mean "other people should be working because it will enable me personally to buy more stuff (that they produce)", not "each person should be working because working will allow that person to buy themselves more stuff".
> if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.
So what happens is not _really_ unknown.
> “So what happens is not _really_ unknown.”
I made a career change in my 40s into at a small (< 20 persons) company just above minimum wage. Once my employer decided I was worth keeping around, my wages increased. I was living in a cheap 1rm SRO (very hard to find), commuting 1.5h to Manhattan. Now after 11yrs I’ve purchased a coop in Queens. I put my success as due to low cost of living.
A guaranteed income _might_ have helped do this faster. The jobs I had (previous to now) directly lead me to cheap housing owned by that employer. My next 2 years were filled with labor abuse—long hours below minimum wage. But That community took care of its own. I don’t know how that scales up with everyone getting this Guaranteed Wage. Maybe this GW helps you rent at market rates, but I had some rent forbearance in the form of more abusive work in that little community. You can’t have that with government assistance. Work and housing at the bottom are precarious, and you need support which in my case came from the same private source.
I guess what I’m trying to get my head around is the idea government programs are inflationary but in a way that the underground economy are not.
Quick AI research: the number of people receiving minimum income benefits in European countries represents under 5% of the population. So I don't think that tells you what happens to society when this becomes a primary source of income for a significant minority if not the majority of people.
If you adjust for all ways people receive minimum income benefits, not just the 'final resort' one, you get
> In Belgium, roughly 4.35 million adults (aged 18 and older) are not working out of an adult population of about 9.5 million, around 45%.
Of those, roughly 3.95 million or 40% receive government income above the leefloon.
Are you counting retired workers?
Absolutely.
Do note that in the US (and loads of countries) people save for their own retirement, whereas in Belgium the government pays the retirement in a "workers today pay retirees today" system.
Are you also counting workers on vacation? On a weekend? At home after their shift?
If those workers receive pay from somebody else than their employer to do that, one might count them, but I don't know any countries where they do. I don't think there are economic metrics that take weekends into account when defining regular employment.
I'm not sure what you're aiming at with this question.
There is no ontological difference between:
- a worker taking a few weeks of paid rest as a compensation for working several months,
- and a worker taking a few years of paid rest as a compensation for working several decades.
Whatever practicalities you may invoke to make them seem different, these situations are in essence the same.
A retiree and a person during a weekend are not even close to the same. For one, the econometrists have no problem distinguishing them, because they don't look the same at all. I can get accurate numbers for retirees, and they will not be confused by people who are off for the weekend.
For two, in context of the original article, what matters is "are they working" which the author clarified to "having a job". A person during the weekend has a job, a retired person does not. Again, no confusion.
For three, in the context of minimum guaranteed wage: a person during the weekend is not paid by the government, but by his employer. A retired person is paid his pension by the government. So one can go in the bucket of people that is actually receiving a minimum income already, the other one does not. So within the context of my first post, they also don't look the same.
If there is a parallel you are seeing and I'm missing, feel free to point it out. What I agree with is that from the person's perspective, they are both not working (in a sense not meant by the OP) and both receiving an income (though from a different source). But after that all similarity stops as far as I can tell.
Why do you assume that "retired workers" are not included in the group "people"?
I'm sure its saying living loan (could be grant in this context) or assistance and not "pay to stay alive".
"Loon" is Dutch for wage. A loan would be "lening", even though "loon" and loan sound exactly the same.
> not "pay to stay alive"
Focus on this part. (Edit: I consider the choice of words either clumsy or insensitive)
Because without an income people tend to not live for very long and that idea makes people uncomfortable? I had not considered that.
"Wage to live on" is perhaps a more euphonic translation then.
In Belgium they make "Living Wage" extremely unattractive by having a LOT of extra conditions associated with it. In other words: a number of people at least as large as the number getting leefloon choose to instead do with nothing (and not pay rent, and steal, and ...)
Why? A few conditions to getting leefloon:
1) you have to rent (officially) and pay your rent (we'll start of easy)
2) you do not get enough money to pay rent in any of the big cities. Oh and the city and police will hate you since OCMW eats out of their budgets
The amount depends on your circumstances, but minimum wage in Belgium (which you won't get on "interim" jobs, btw) is 2200 (after tax).
Leefloon is: 800 if sharing an apartment, 1300 if you live by yourself, 1800 if you provide for at least one child.
3) you must give FULL insight to all your finances to the OCMW. If you have savings you are not eligible (and if you don't they can reclaim up to 10 years of benefits)
If you own a house you have to sell that and live off the proceeds until they run out before you become eligible for leefloon.
4) you must give FULL insight to your entire situation to the OCMW. If you have any sort of support, even outside of the country, you are not eligible (standard 10 year ...)
5) you must be willing to work, unless you have a recent certification from a Belgian doctor that you are permanently unable to (and you have to get that again, at your expense, every year). Oh and you have to prove this, at minimum once per month, but usually once per year. Going to the OCMW, wait 2 hours, list, with proof, what you've done to get a job since last time
This includes working for free "for the community", which means for city hall.
Oh, there are now several ways for employers to pay you less than minimum wage, as well as make you pay for insurance ("interim" jobs) and you can't refuse those jobs if on leefloon
6) you must let the OCMW do a "social investigation" into you and your entire situation (your home, your friends, your family, ...). This also means you have to accept "social help" (which many people are unwilling to do because, well because it sucks). OCMW wants you to take drug treatment? You have to? OCMW wants you to learn a language course? You have to show up. OCMW wants you to take a plumber course? You have to.
7) you have to justify ALL your expenses (meaning you have to get receipts for everything, down to every drink you buy in the supermarket), and go over them on a monthly basis with an OCMW employee.
8) you're not allowed to do any kind of studying (and can't have done so in the last 2 years)
9) OCMW is known for being very unpleasant to work with, to the point they need police protection in a lot of places (certainly in cities)
This is VERY different from UBI. Very, very, very different.
The way to cheat the system is to "work", but be fake long term ill. You get a job, you get a doctor to declare you long term ill (you know, take drugs before you do or something) and they can't fire you for 2 years. This will generally pay between double and triple leefloon for as long as it lasts.
Needless to say, the government is in a fight with doctors. The government wants to set a quota on doctors for how many patients they can declare long-term ill. And doctors complain, first about patients that are long term ill and patients' existnece doesn't respect quotas, second about patients that threaten (and commit) violence unless they get their long-term-ill certification. Obviously government also demands doctors don't refuse patients and almost never gives any kind of protection even in hospitals (meaning hospitals have to provide private security which is fine for huge hospitals but a problem for small ones. Also, obviously, such security will not protect patients' rights against doctors).
Obviously employers don't want this, since the government has decided they're paying most of the wage in this case. This is so expensive, even just one long term ill employee can make a company go out of business, and even huge companies have a big burden of people who do this.
The number of ex-youth services kids (who were removed from their parents against their will) who have given this system as a reason for their suicide is in the double digits now.
Neither Belgium, nor the Netherlands, have anything remotely resembling UBI. And that people avoid this system has nothing to do with inherent willingness to work.
I think you are reproducing in your own words the exact point the author was trying to make
It's legit funny how often this occurs. We just like to argue it seems
I don't read that at all in anything he wrote.
> Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
I read the author's post as a paean to letting people who can't contribute above the ever raising bar just exist securely as they please, rather than make whole countries suffer in the attempt to employ them.
You didn't get the same thing? Let me reread it
I also got out of the article that we shouldn't let people work who shouldn't work (the water as a resource vs labor as a resource comparison). That implies those people are provided for in a different way than wages.
> Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem
Imagine there’s a ratio of that category of people that’s a more optimal ratio than zero.
The big question though is: can you have a society in which one group works and another doesn't? Ostensibly, the working group would be the ones who create and/or own all the value that supports the ones who don't.
At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides.
And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.
> Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
Most people make more than subsistence incomes; ergo, they are working for more than basic necessities.
> “…bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.”
Which I believe lead directly to T in p45.
I have family in WI and it’s about jobs. What’s more, they’re tired of ‘costal elites’ and ‘we live in a global economy; nothing we can do about offshoring.’
I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride."
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
> does economics support that statement always?
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
We're getting close to post-scarcity on calories at this point. You can feed someone three meals of rice and beans for under an hour of minimum wage labour in most of the developed world, which is pretty neat even if the extra money is going to housing and non-food essentials.
> Economics itself is the enemy. Economics arise out of scarcity.
Scarcity is a timeless fact of life in a finite world, it's not some abstract invention by "economics".
The problem isn't that more people want more things than they can have. The hardest possible life is that of a single human alone on a planet abundant in all natural resources. People and our inventions and our work and our ambitions to improve things for the next generation are the very things that reduce scarcity for other people we share this planet with.
> Scarcity is a timeless fact of life in a finite world
I agree, and I think the rest of your post contains the key idea:
> reduce scarcity
Scarcity will never be zero, and it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be infinitesimal, close enough to zero for economics to become irrelevant.
Well, my ancestors would already say that our scarcity is effectively zero.
Yet we still have political arguments about healthcare and I get irritated when my AI service says I'm out of quota, two things that didn't exist 4 or 5 generations ago. Unless you consider whiskey and opium to be healthcare. It's amazing what we've adapted to.
Scarcity can and is manipulated, see de Beers!
Yes. All forms of artificial scarcity must be declared to be literally illegal. Diamonds are nothing, we've got the entire intellectual property industry to contend with.
This was tried and we ended up with intellectual property rights because encouraging the creation of works was more important than having zero/poor quality works but a free for all.
> To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
> the socialists
Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning.
Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state.
Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator.
Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home.
> neo-luddities
Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject.
> the ones that are for automation are the billionaires
Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.
> must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs
Computers used to be the size of these fabs. Now we have them in our pockets. Not because we need to attack or rebel or something. It's because a lot of people worked very hard over many decades to make it possible. And it wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts -- it's because they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.
No matter how smart you are, it is not possible to create a GPU in one's basement. And no matter how holy you think you are, you need incentives to invest the time and effort to make this happen.
> No matter how smart you are, it is not possible to create a GPU in one's basement.
Is this really such a law of the universe or just insufficient technology?
I mean, there's not like some "big silicon" conspiracy keeping people from homelabbing their own chips. I suppose we'll find out at some point, but it sure as hell isn't possible in 2026 AD.
Socialists want to seize the means of production in order to democratise it and move towards communism, which is exactly a post-scarcity post-state destruction of the [capitalist] economy. It is entirely compatible with giving everyone AI and a replicator - the free association of producers and all that. Marx would disagree that you can skip the state part on your way to communism, sure, and I think he’s probably right, but maybe not.
> in order to democratise it
Don't believe that even for a second.
> move towards communism
Has never happened, and I don't believe it ever will.
We have better chances of collapsing capitalism from within.
> We have better chances of collapsing capitalism from within.
Isn't that what Marx says? Capitalism is unstable and collapses from within. He identifies socialism as the next stage (seizing the means of production) that then leads to communism (fully distributed ownership and no real state).
We may of course disagree that these stages are what would actually happen. So far when the state seizes the means of production, it becomes highly authoritarian and doesn't want to relinqish power and move towards actual communism.
It's possible that Marx was right about that specifically, and that capitalism will destroy itself naturally through sheer technological innovation by automating everything to the point economics becomes irrelevant.
I'm deeply suspicious of any socialist or communist who desires to implement a socialist state, however. His prophecy must come true naturally, it cannot be forced via government mandates.
Socialists want to get rid of capitalism as the economic model and then transition to post scarcity. I want to keep capitalism until it destroys itself by making everything abundant and automated.
There is no need to "seize" anything. We merely need personal manufacturing technology.
Personal manufacturing tech isnt something he envisaged I guess!
Still need food, water, energy and raw materials though. Some kind of collective action seems needed, however that is arranged politically.
> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given
Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
That won't be a good heuristic much longer. A few weeks back I saw Gemini write "Redundant Abstraciton Overhead" (-citon instead of -ction). It was the first time I saw a model make a "typo", so I made a note of it.
I've seen Opus 5 make typos this week, which is something I haven't seen since early GPT days. I have no idea why.
In non-English languages, LLMs seem to make typos way more often than humans.
Which ones?
I haven't seen them in Dutch, so I wonder what the languages that do have typos have in common.
When my girlfriend was conversing with an LLM in Czech, it often made grammatical mistakes or even switched into a different Slavic language (including ones that use the Cyrillic alphabet!).
<3 you know what, I'm keeping it now.
For most of my life I thought no apostrophe was always wrong, since that's how you do both contractions and possessives in general with a name or noun. For some reason all throughout school people would say "it's" as a possessive was wrong without trying to explain "its" was a parallel to the separate words "his" and "hers", rather than "bradfitz's" or "that person's" like it looked like. Only someone in my 20s did I realize the connection and "its" stopped looking wrong.
We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
>Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.
There are plenty of people who do not accept this.
We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them.
The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
Woa. I'm with you all the way but let's agree that the people who think the disabled should be exterminated is a minority many of whom died at then end of world war II? Even if I tolerated someone else exterminating people, hell even if I helped in some way I would still know that it is not morally defensible. Of course with 8B people you will find some willing to exterminate the disabled but not "lots" by any stretch.
I'm sure it is a small minority who think that way. It's impossible to tell for sure, but my gut tells me the number is still larger than we might want to believe.
> The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
- Arthur C. Clarke
I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%.
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
Before that, a more important question is: why assume that buying or having "more stuff" leads to a better life?
Human life requires some consumables. Even with less stuff, you will always need some stuff.
That 'some' is actually very little compared to rich countries' GDP per capita. You could argue that a lot is wasted acquiring useless stuff.
We need very few non perishables aside from the roof on your head.
Even a roof on your head is perishable over time.
Also true but that's not something I can easily show with economics.
Do we assume that?
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.
> "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person,
Taxes themselves are the hurt. You're ignoring that the taxes are collected from that person and that they could be spend on something that person would want more.
We need taxes, don't get me wrong, but it's entirely reasonable for people to have an opinion on what's done with the money they worked for.
Crab bucket mentality demands pointless hazing rituals and distribution of sufficient suffering.
As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone.
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?".
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
The dream society would be where we all just work less hours. Everyone can get a job but doesn't have to burn every workable hour of their life.
This, for some reason makes too much sense. So much so that I’m curious if there is some sort of world wide conspiracy to not do this.
If more people were employed during less time, we would also need more administration.
Not to mention that there are at least two sectors where there can never be enough employees: medicine and education.
I think the simplest answer that probably accounts for most of it is just that employees all have overhead, 20 people working full time is more efficient than 40 people working half time. Less HR work, less moving context between people, less office space, less laptops, etc.
So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
40 is probably the most optimal way to extract the most value out of the most people. If only some worked less, there would probably be bigger HR overhead, like you say, plus those individuals would be less communicable. In reality, those companies who extract the most value from their workers are able to outcompete others, so the system stays. If company would pay less to workers (for less time used, half of "normal" employment), they would try to compensate with getting another job just to support themselves, because most workers are typically always on edge of supporting themselves (they move that edge whenever they get more money). If companies paid for less hours, their products would cost too much and couldn't compete with other companies.
I feel like we should be doing something like requiring paying overtime for over 30 hours a week. The complication here is countries are competing with each other as well as internally. That said, most jobs are local, so cheap construction workers or child care workers overseas don't compete with local ones.
This combined with doing something about housing prices seems like it could work.
> so cheap construction workers or child care workers overseas don't compete with local ones.
That's also why building homes is so costly. Transporting non-local materials costs more than making them near. Then you need to support builders, plumbers, electricians...
Don't forget about elderly care, which is not a subset of medicine.
Rate of profit = Exploitation rate ÷ (1 + Organic composition of capital)
> The dream society would be where we all just work less hours. Everyone can get a job but doesn't have to burn every workable hour of their life.
That's not the world our Overlords want for us. They want us to literally work ourselves to death making them richer than Gods as cheaply as possible, and then fall over into a convenient nearby pit and bury ourselves for their convenience.
It’s not even a hypothetical. That’s what was happening (at least towards the end) during socialism in Eastern Europe. Since everybody had to have a job, the over-employment produced a lot of slackers.
Same thing was also happening in Gulags.
> A politician should not need to hunt for job creating policies, and yet they do because admittedly the alternative is poverty.
This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.
What sloppy slop is that?
> Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop.
This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense.
> When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making
The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean?
> That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder?
Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists,
There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour.
It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.
Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.
I wish a different adjective was used other than 'stupid', because it can distract from the point of the article (I wanted to come up with an acronym - best attempt: Someone Too Unsuitably Positioned In D workforce, and finally asked chat gpt: Someone Tragically Unqualified, Poorly Integrated & Deployed). Anyhow, I don't take it as an insult to anyone, but simply people's circumstances (limited opportunities, lack of education..) can make it difficult for them to positively contribute to the system.
its not so obvious that the stupid person won't provide positive returns at the margins.
i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
So by "working", the author really means "working for a wage"?
Not everyone needs to work. Some people have enough in savings to cover their expenses. Other people have benefactors (most notably, parents). And others live off of property that was stolen by violent gangs (aka taxes) and provided to them as a method to ensure that those gang members get to keep their position through the voting process.
Feels like related to [0].
Looks shallowly philosophical, based on "me and my friend". Equating "economy" to some small subset of white collar work.
Have to say world is much bigger place and there are other jobs than filling in tables in Excel spreadsheet.
The definition of 'work' itself is pretty arbitrary. Someone writing for fun could end up being 'work' if it inspires some large change in the world. And someone doing lots of labor could barely move the needle.
In that sense, not everyone (who is eligible to work or looks like they are working) is working in the first place.
The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them.
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.
It might be a net loss to the economy, true.
But to me it’s about you trying to contribute.
I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money.
Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.
> I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American.
In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
I’m not. I’m from a welfare state EU country and worked with these people for years. Some really can’t work; a lot of them can but just don’t want to, and cost the taxpayers thousands per month for smoking weed all day.
I'm happy to give some lazy dude smoking weed all day my tax money.
1. Working gives me satisfaction and money.
2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money.
3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
There is also the category of people who have enough capital to not to work. This group of people have detached their activity from their income. They can be very active or lazy and it does not make a big difference. You are working to pay their dividends.
In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs
What makes you think that those emails are trivial amounts of work?
Then why Star Wars is considered a dystopia and Star Trek is considered an Utopia?
How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals?
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
I read it completely differently, and I was expecting a mention to UBI any line soon.
Godwin's new law!
That’s not a right-wing thought BTW. Publoc schools in Germany for instance are highly exclusionary.
Is this a guerilla ad by anthropic ceo?
This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.
Indeed, the rhetoric is uncanny.
Because otherwise the question becomes: who decides who should be working and who should not?
Why you should not be working and i should?
Clearly he is not a socialist LOL
I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...
> I disagree...because art and poetry and philosophy exist
Can you expand your point? I don't see how their existence leads to disagreeing with the author, and in fact I see the opposite.
Seems obvious: arts and philosophy are not of immediate value. They need "free" patronage.
it would be naive to assume that you would be paid to be an artist or poet in a socialism as opposed to a farmer
In socialism, you wouldn’t be paid. That’s the whole point.
Yea, we saw the bread lines.
So did we.
UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.
UBI is inherently inflationary and as far as I can tell there's no solution to that problem.
That’s a misleading generalisation. Yes, it appears like an inflation vector, then if you follow the money it’s not that simple. In a closed utopian town system of 100 people that would cause inflation, in the real world -no.
UBI funded through LVT is not inflationary.
Inflation isn't a bad thing if everyone particpates in it. The world of hoarding is passe in UBI world.
Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families.
We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.
As I see it #1 is the real problem. People whose sense of self worth is intimately tied to having authority over others don’t take kindly to it being threatened, and have many tools at their disposal to punish those who try.
As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)
Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?
It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems.
Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.
Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.