In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”
Starve in the morning, starve in the afternoon, starve in the evening, self-criticise instead of dinner.
Even if we do build fully-automated and autonomous means to grow/build/create everything we need, identity in this era is still overwhelmingly rooted in our jobs. I am a Developer, she is a farmer, he is a doctor. If all the jobs go to robots, what are we?
Ask any jobless person for whom no job exists how they feel about life.
Agreed. However, if you drive a tractor and write code to drive tractors, say, are you a coder or a farmer (or a software engineering or a soil scientist ...).
Perhaps you see yourself primarily as a mother, or an artist, or ...
I see myself as a human. What I do for money or for hobby doesn't define me all by itself. I'm interested in music production as well as in B2B sales. I'm a software engineer as well as someone who spends weeks at a time in the nature without any electronics at all. You can't say that I'm a software engineer or a DJ or a salesman. I'm all of these.
this is assuming that new industries shall not develop once complete automation (of those possible) is achieved. engineering jobs - for example - should branch out to many more folds of specializations compared to where they are now.
you are being restricted by - I am making assumptions here - a lack of creativity and a desire to be sarcastic. We may also differ in our interpretation of what "engineering" is. There are numerous jobs already in existence that are likely a thousand years away from being able to reach automation. However, should economy proceed normally after achieving full automation of what is possible within this century - my statement may become clearer.
Distance between our respective positions on this topic is enough that I have to spend considerably more effort to communicate using words a more complete explanation.
p.s. I love to edit as much as I am able to, and dislike those that are prejudiced otherwise.
This is my thought: once true AI is achieved, everything we know can be automated, because true AI will be able to do all things humans can do. I believe true AI will be achieved this century. These claims are my personal thoughts and due to the unpredictable nature inventions occurn these thoughts are not based on any research.
that is quite a pessimistic view on human capability (justified in current context because of shitbags) while equally bullish on human-developed AI capabilities. Sure, machine learning — blah — self-improving machines — blah - but I say, improving within bounds but cannot provide mathematical proof of the necessity of existence of such bounds blah.
machines have us beat on speed. however, let us not be blinded by this singularly awesome edge machines provide.
In Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, set in the 2400's, most people work 20 hour weeks with the rest of their time spent on hobbies. A minority of people, whose jobs are their passions, work significantly more than 20 hours, this is termed Voking (as in, to be a vocateur) and is considered kinda unusual.
Reading between the lines, I think full automation is entirely possible in the setting but the world naturally settled on a 20 hour week to give everyone the benefits of purpose etc.
I'd also like to plug Iain M Banks' Culture series as an example of post-scarcity living. There is no shortage of ways to spend one's time or define one's identity without it being coupled to income generation.
I supposed limited to owns imagination. While I agree it will be a fundamental shift in thinking, especially for current and older generations, kids who are born and grow with this mindset will have no problem finding something else to do. How about doing science for fun - trying to discover new things. The drive for money and power can be replaced with the drive of prestige and recognition? It is not so hard to imagine.
I am by all means as capitalist as I would imagine are the majority of the audience on this forum but I cannot deny the fact that there are disadvantages to our way of life and without exploring other ways it is hard to conclude which one is better.
Here is another provoking thought. Imagine that we expand the human lifespan well over 500 years. Would you be still doing what you are doing today at the same age? While there will be certainly wealthy people if we live in a capitalistic society, we can also imagine that some people may decide to do a lot of different things in their first 100 years and many other things in the second 100 years and so on. But that system may not be viable. What if 1 in 5 people get to be rich and live wealthy? I would not say that this will work but in your 500 years, you will have 100 that the society will allow you just "because" to be very wealthy and live a wealthy lifestyle. These ideas sound crazy for sure but who knows.
Jobless people, eg retirees, who have their needs met but choose to "work" seem often happy. My father was a teacher, his pension is sufficient, he spends his days working with a teaching union.
A friend who was a construction engineer builds extensions and does building work for relatives.
My mother when she was able lent her extensive knowledge of countryside planning to the local council, helped on patients fora for hospitals, cared for more elderly members of the community.
They all do "jobs" that can be paid for, none of them needed to financially. They all seem content in their roles.
Being penniless and being jobless are different things. Moreover, not all people choose to find identity in the jobs they do for survival.
I've been jobless for a bit. It's really depressing. That's because I'm supposed to have a job. Socially and financially, I am less of a person for not having a job.
If I wasn't required to have a job? If I could live a full life without one? I wouldn't mind on bit.
He, and Keynes' prediction of 15 hour work weeks, were largely right. We spend quite few hours in the week doing the work we need for basic shelter, food and security, at least to a 1845/1930 standard. You could theoretically live in a simple house in a non-congested corner of countryside and feed a small family simple food on perhaps a days average wages a week (there are some logistics around actually getting someone to hire you for a day a week).
What they got wrong is that the things we ended up prioritizing for the rest of the time are luxuries, that costs money and that we thus need to work to afford, rather than merely leisure time. This then pushes us to want to live in (expensive) cities, to be near better jobs and luxury spending opportunities, which again means we have to earn more to afford this.
Not really - you can't choose to work 15 hour weeks at most places, even if that is all the money you need. I know if I could CHOOSE to work 20hrs/week and get paid half the salary I definitely would, but that's not an option for 99% of us. I prioritize time over luxuries, but employers still dictate the terms.
3 employees doing 20hrs costs more than one doing 60hrs even if the pay is the same. That said I'd expect 3 employees to also bring more value and have greater productivity.
You can't choose 15 hour work weeks over a 45 year career, but you can choose to work 45 hour weeks over a 15 year career and retire. It's doable, but it helps if you adopt a 1950s-esque lifestyle and standard of living.
Interestingly, you're legally allowed to ask for this in the UK (it's still at the employer's discretion, but more places, especially large ones, will actively consider it if you're worth keeping).
I chose to alter mine slightly, cutting from 37.5 to 35 (I could have gone properly part-time to 20 if I didn't need the money), and everything is just pro rated.
Perhaps it's a Europe vs US thing, but it's fairly common to request changes to your career design to allow for flexible working. Obviously it works best for knowledge worker jobs, but it's also applicable to all kinds of shift-pattern work too.
The argument of course is that if you need multiple people to cover the role, the overhead cost is more. However, on a twofold point: many employers know about the BS around productive hours and don't always need cover (I work with people who work shorter hours than I and they aren't covered), and larger organisations (the unsexy ones) can abosrb this without barely a glance.
"Work is badly distributed. People have too much, or too little, or both in the same month. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected. Workers lack the time or energy to raise children attentively, or to look after elderly relations. “The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” ... This neglect will only get worse as the population grows and ages."
This is the real message of the article. Its not about giving everybody a robot butler, its about reorganising society to allow us to do all of the things that need to be done. We don't need to have lots of people working long poorly paid shifts at Wallmart, but we do need people to look after the young and the elderly. At the moment we have a tendency to look at working class people who dont work as morally lacking, when often they have quite a lot of useful (non-paid) things to be getting on with. We need to change the way we think about what makes somebody a useful member of society
Our success at combating strict gender roles that kept women out of the workplace hasn't been matched with a social embrace of stay-at-home dads or other family members who don't work in order to focus on helping care for their loved ones. Unfortunately, instead we've ended up with a society where everyone is just expected to work all the time. There needs to be less stigma against people without jobs. We need to stop assuming that everything of value is always done for a profit.
Do you mean to say "for a short-term, monetary profit"?
Because there are other types of profit, more subjective ones, like feeling good, emotional well-being, long-term sustainability etc, which are more elusive by definition but nevertheless super important.
Because if you're really talking about a lack "profit" in the very general (aka inviting a straight loss), then the question simply becomes: Who will pay for this loss, and why?
I think you answered this question yourself: some forms of value are subjective. Some vitally important benefits to the people around you don't show up on a balance sheet. People will gladly pay to be a patron of the arts, or just to make someone they like happy, and it doesn't have to involve a quantifiable return on investment.
I guess the market adjusts, in areas with constrained housing supply the prices rise to the level affordable by working couples, in other areas peoples material expectations rise.
In the end we have moved from women not being able to join the workforce to women not being able to not join the workforce. It doesn't seem an obvious improvement to me, although I should mention I'm not a woman.
These conversations I feel always seem shallow to me. Automation is definitely helping to free us from a lot of work.. but the world we live in today feels like a preview of what an automated world feels like. In reality, our material lifestyle is still supported by a very large number of people working away in countries most Americans can't find on a map for extremely low wages.
If we're going to talk about "reorganizing society", it should factor in EVERY person in the world. Not just the lucky 10% in first world countries.
I agree, but I think we absolutely need to be thinking right now about how society is going to be functioning three or four decades from now. The rate of technological advancement hasn't slowed down, and depending on how closely you're following developments in a lot of these countries we traditionally think of as poor or underdeveloped you might find yourself surprised at how quickly they're starting to catch up.
> Automation is definitely helping to free us from a lot of work.. but the world we live in today feels like a preview of what an automated world feels like. In reality, our material lifestyle is still supported by a very large number of people working away in countries most Americans can't find on a map for extremely low wages.
I don't know about you but the homes, roads, cars, plumbing, healthcare, energy, food, and most other things vital to our lifestyle do not come from China or Taiwan. And even where Asian products are popular (e.g. big home appliances), European alternatives do exist.
I feel like people in the tech sphere can't look or see beyond smartphones, laptops, and other tech gadgets.
>And even where Asian products are popular (e.g. big home appliances), European alternatives do exist.
I can think of Miele. That's the only one that's propely German still. Bosch/Siemens are both very much Asian on the inside. They do some assembly in Germany as far as I know. Can't think of any other European brands in this space.
How about Electrolux (AEG, Rosenlew, etc.), Liebherr, Gorenje/Asko/Upo, Festivo, Smeg, Hotpoint? If you want to avoid Asian products, we can buy American too.. e.g. Whirlpool.
ah don't mention Electrolux, that brand has been just a disappointment to me.
Subpar dishwasher (comparable Siemens one cleans dishes visibly better), very subpar washing machine (integrated dryer has almost 0 effect on how wet laundry is), kitchen hood above stove stopped working completely after 6 months (of course this one is most costly to change because its integrated to the wall). All bought in 2016 for flat reconstruction, none of them basic models, rather higher ones (but not highest). I am not that rich to afford managing of those crappy things.
Never, ever again (I had same type of experience with Whirlpool cca 10 years ago). For +-reasonable pricing, Siemens & Bosch, for absolute quality and reliability, Miele.
Such improvements tend to spread from rich to poor. People in developing countries choose those horrible factory jobs because they're still better than subsistence farming. China is lifting huge numbers of people from abject poverty every year. Eventually wages rise.
> Such improvements tend to spread from rich to poor.
Best example - the mobile phone. Even the poor can get one that is better than the best smartphone of a few years ago.
Access to content has seen a similar trend - we now all have access to massive amounts of information, videos and online conversation. No money needed, so the poor get immediately the same level of access as the rich.
I find the use of this statistic really frustrating, if you're say an average westerner with $10,000 of debt and $2,000 savings - your net wealth is -$8,000. If on the other hand you sift through garbage somewhere in Africa and earn 50c per day your net wealth is ~$0. By this metric the garbage site worker is wealthier than the Westerner fresh from university.
Well they are more wealthier till that debt is paid off. However, the metric does not include cash flow. The westerner has a greater cash flow than the person in Africa. However, what happen if that person looses their job? Suddenly, their quality life will probably drop. They might even end homeless unable to pay rent. However, the westerner is probably better off overall.
First derivative of wealth would be income or spending. I think it's better to go the other way: consider the integral of cash flows over time (i.e. net present value). It would still be pretty uncertain.
Yes and no. I purposely chose the mathematical notation rather than the more common economical terms to convey a different idea.
If you look at the instantaneous\* derivative, it's not the fact that you owe the federal government $2M for that MD that counts but rather your monthly obligation. Debt doesn't matter, required repayment per unit of time does - so almost like cash-basis accounting.
Finding a $100 on the street or borrowing $100 from a friend are the same in terms of their addition to your instantaneous wealth, it's the fact that one needs to be repaid that detracts from your "actual" wealth, and the repayment period matters. Compare the lifestyle of two neighbors working at the same institution making the same amount of money that each took out $500k mortgages to buy their identical houses, only one took it out for 15 years and the other for 30. On day 1, they both take the same hit to their net worth, but that doesn't change their wealth derivative in and of itself, it's the rate of paying it back that you should be counting.
That explains why one college educated individual can get a loan for $1000 from the bank and at time 0 they are, under this metric, better off than someone that needed to hit up a payday loans place for the same loan but at a higher interest rate. They both "earned" the same amount of money, and may even "spend" it on the same thing at the same rate, but when you take the repayment period into account (let's say 1 year vs 2 weeks, respectively) you can see why the graduate student is measurably better off.
Just like stocks you hold aren't actually contributing to your day-to-day wealth (and as such aren't taxed) but it's when you cash out that you've either made or lost money.
\* let's define an "instant" as a month, just to make things easier.
I think the point is that there are things that aren't captured by looking at wealth alone. Having a college degree, being inserted in a society that ensures peace, safety and well-being, all that has value.
Yes, and (ideally) currency in an economy is a liquid representation of value. A college degree translates (after accounting for inefficiencies) to higher income potential, more efficient spending, etc.
EDIT: typo, "liquid representation of value," not "wealth"
Well, using figures from http://time.com/money/4746795/richest-people-in-the-world/, if we take the top eight, sum their fortunes (conveniently expressed in billions), and divide by 3.6, we find that a maximally equitable redistribution would allocate, to each of the lucky recipients, the princely sum of $165.38 US.
So, I'm going to guess the problem may lie somewhere other than with eight really rich people. But we don't really need to do the math on this one, do we? It doesn't even pass the sniff test - "these eight people are LITERALLY THE WORST" is just far too uncomplicated a proposition to accurately reflect the reality of a human world which, though many things, is never simple.
Thats just the top 8 people...Take the sum of the rest of the the global 1% or even 10% and do your math...
OH nm, the math has already been done.
280 trillion in global wealth / 6 billion people = 46k per person
And the top 10% has 86% percent of it, and the inequality is just growing exponentially.
I'm not advocating that wealth should be equally distributed OR that capitalism is all bad..however, that in-equality is STAGGERING....unregulated capitalism with no income redistribution is a one way ticket to a third world PLANET.
It's not terribly controversial that anarchocapitalism is a bad idea. It's also an entirely different proposition from the one you previously advanced.
Unregulated capitalism is not what's causing the massive inequality we see today. It's the financial and monetary policies. I'm not saying we shouldn't have regulations but the ones we have are centralizing wealth into the biggest corporations. If you look this modern massive growth of inequality doesn't really start until the 1970's after we whet off the gold standard and theirs an uptick in inequality every time the fed decides it needs to pump a bunch of money into the economy.
Do you have examples of these 'financial and monetary policies' you're referring to?
What I see is that Wal-Mart makes a ton of money and their employees have to be on food stamps and still work 80 hour weeks while the owners reap all of the profit.
To me this is simply unregulated capitalism which nowdays has become thinly masked slavery.
Walmart employees don't work 80 hours a week...that's absurd, most can barely handle a 4 hour shift. All in all people get what they're worth, want to earn more money? Bring more valuable talents to the table.
> Unregulated capitalism is not what's causing the massive inequality we see today. It's the financial and monetary policies.
Well, considering that financial and monetary policies are aimed at deregulation, and that financialization of the economy in developed countries is a thing, it would appear that unregulated capitalism is precisely what is causing massive inequality.
But income redistribution only adress the symptom. The capital assets driving the inequality would still be firmly in their control. You must put a price on ownership it self to really make a difference.
Because if this people gave away this money, the effect on the very poor might be noticeable for some months but not sustainable. In no time they would be very poor again and the ones that gave the money away would be unable to give more.
Paul Graham has an essay about this error, how people thinks that there's a fixed amount of money. Once you understand that wealth is created and how, you can't talk like that with a straight face.
Paul Graham's article on income inequality was of terribly poor quality (not sure if that's the one you're referencing).
He fails to even begin to discuss capital, return on capital, and capital ownership as drivers in economic inequality. Basically it feels like a piece written by a smart guy who has no idea what he's talking about but feels emboldened because "economists are all idiots".
> a $150 cash grant to poor women in the northern part of [Uganda] doubled their earnings within a year, while one-off $382 transfers to 16- to 35-year-olds were associated with 40-percent higher earnings four years later.
i remember when the panama papers first came out there was a story of a guy who bribed the leadership of some third world country to basically rob the country of its mineral rights. so with that $165 you'd also get relief from the damage they actively do with their money.
i'm not saying we should do it, but your analysis doesn't account for any knock on effects, and so is itself far too simple.
To be clear, the billions controlled by these 8 individuals are not in the majority held in cash. The notion of redistributing this wealth is about socializing the benefits and gains from capital investments. As such, a restructuring of this wealth would not look like handing circa $165 to every person on the planet.
I think this view of inequality is misleading. It put emphasis that the top richest should be not rich, or they are not good people. It's a defeating viewpoint that blames other for not having success.
When in fact top 10% richest helped much more people along the way than all average combined. And the consequence is being rich.
Instead of complaining about inequality (aka making the rich poorer), better to think about how to make the poor richer.
But, when those extremely rich are siphoning money away from others (via paying for laws that favor them, exploiting workers, etc.), it absolutely makes sense to say, 'Hey, you don't need all that. You need to share more than you are.'
I completely agree with the drift of your comment, but would nitpick the notion of "sharing" in this context: since, as has been explained above, the system is effectively gamed to legitimize the capturing of value by those that already have most of it from those that produce it and do not, the current situation is tantamount to legalized theft by one class from another. I don't follow that a thief can share something he stole with the person from which he stole it.
> top 10% richest helped much more people along the way than all average combined
That's complete bullshit. That's maybe how you wish things were. But it's not. I'm in the top 10%, and I've done nothing for it other than having been born in a wealthy country to middle-class parents, with my every need attended to by society. Had I been born somewhere else, I certainly would not be successful as I am now. Instead of being a physicist, maybe I would be boxing cheap plastic gadgets in a factory in Asia. I was born into the top rung on the current global economic arrangement, instead of on the bottom.
To put it this way: if hard work led to wealth every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
In fact the top 10% keep the statu quo as it is because it benefits them. It benefits them that global economy is arranged in such a way that they are in the center, reaping the benefits of it, and keeping the "periphery" down and in their place, feeding them and their high standard of living. This means everything from stacking "democratic" governments with plutocratic cronies, to simply being a middle-class voter interested in maintaining things just as they are.
I don't have the problem with people being rich, poor are the ones that are fairly easy to help, yet we are not doing it. And most likely not taxing the rich enough or the right way.
> Do you know that 8 people in the world have as much wealth as 3.6 BILLION people. That inequality is STAGGERING.
This. This is the root of the issue in its entirety. As a civilized species (civilized in the sense that we "have" civilization) we should ban as a practice and ostracize those that propone the privatization of capital gains and the socialization of capital losses. Period. The figure posted by parent speaks volumes of the flaws of the currently dominant economic paradigm.
I hate to get too tangential and throw shade in a generically, but I've always felt like those of us that aspire to be millionaires, etc., are doing it wrong.
I've been calling amazon prime a "hiding of the poor" to my friends and family. Hide the laborers in a far off insanely demanding warehouse, you just get the goods.
(I don't have prime, I don't use prime, and I don't want this to be our future.)
Yes, this is exactly it. Slavery was distasteful so we used the modern economy to abstract the slavery out of sight, hide it under the rug. One click buy! Pay no attention to the machine behind the curtain.
Wish Amazon would offer an entirely "Made in first world with protected workers" store.
In many of these countries people voluntarily choose to work in these factories. They're terrible places to work, but apparently its still better than working in the fields.
A more effective strategy might be something like: https://www.ijm.org/who-we-are . They work within these countries to protect workers from the worst human rights abuses. (ie child sex trafficking and slavery)
You should read about [Enclosure][1]. Most people, historically, given the choice between traditional subsistence farming, and industrial labor, chose subsistence farming. So governments and property owners took away the option of subsistence farming. This was a 16th-19th century process in Britain, but is an ongoing process in poorer countries now.
This is pretty well what happened to my family pre-mid-1800's (not sure exactly when). The Highland Clearances resulted in them leaving Ayrshire to work in Broxburn/Uphall near Edinburgh which at the time were essentially towns owned by shale mining companies. They remained there at least 100 years until one member defiantly decided to move to Canada (mid 1900s).
> Show me people doing things they would do even if they weren't getting paid to do it. That's voluntary.
The presence of compensation does not preclude an action from being voluntary. Neither does the presence of universal biological imperatives like the need for food or shelter. These things are forced on us by nature, not other people, and are part of the basic human condition.
Providing necessary things for yourself is a voluntary action.
Interacting with others of your own free will to provide the things you need more easily than you could do on your own is also a voluntary action.
It only becomes involuntary when that interaction is forced on you, making you worse off than you would have been on your own (as always, from your own subjective point of view).
but Amazon certainly did not invent the warehouse or the conditions some of us think deplorable. there were a few headline making stories but that is all they are. they revealed a job that many expected to not be fun but never really wanted to know the nitty gritty.
there are far worse jobs out there and no amount of automation will rid us of them. from friends that work as linemen; and they all seem to enjoy their jobs; to another who works as a vet; you want a job that not only soaks hours but heartbreak be a vet.
we have plenty of "not fun" jobs but that is exactly why we pay people to do them. there are those around you everyday, I love doing my lawn but have neighbors who don't want to.
modern economy hell, its gotten leagues better than it used to be. people don't realize how much better many jobs are because they believe the sensationalized stories of the day. I am not saying there is no room for improvement but just open your eyes to what was and realize how far we have come
> In reality, our material lifestyle is still supported by a very large number of people working away in countries most Americans can't find on a map for extremely low wages.
> I've been calling amazon prime a "hiding of the poor" to my friends and family. (I don't have prime, I don't use prime, and I don't want this to be our future.)
> Hide the laborers in a far off insanely demanding warehouse, you just get the goods.
Anecdotal, but I have visited a few of the Amazon warehouses in the Seattle area. I was surprised by the amount of effort Amazon went to to emphasize safety, work-life balance, healthy activities, and good work habits. There were free vending machines for PPE everywhere, and during the lunch hour each day, managers led workers in 20 minutes of organized exercise to keep people active and moving.
This is just one cluster of US-based warehouses, and probably doesn't account for the working conditions in all Amazon warehouses, but it was far from a sweatshop and workers seemed genuinely content with their jobs.
I work a full week at one job + 2 nights per week. Feel that I do a lot of unpaid stuff (ie taking care of the household, cooking, ...) but still endlessly hear about how other people "don't have the time".
The useful non paid things that people actually do are greatly overestimated imo, because more often than not it will end up in the "don't have time for it" even though they could manage to find time for it if they really wanted to. Just a matter of priorities.
I'm far from perfect, and I don't do sports (which I also consider an useful non paid thing) for an example. Yet I wish I did, and I totally could if I had some discipline there. But it's not having more time, or less work, that would change it.
It's hard and everyone is lazy and tired, and there are so many easy ways out of the present moment, but the majority really doesn't push themselves much.
I agree with you. Growing up, I never heard the end of it. How housework was a full-time job. My mother chanted "men's work is from sun to sun, women's work is never done" like a nursery rhyme, or a prayer. When I moved out, I discovered that working 40 hrs was pretty hard, but housework was a joke. Right now I probably spend around 10-12 hrs per week, max, on housework. And the overwhelming majority of that is just preparing food, which I could spend less time on if I didn't cook. And housework is easy, repetitive, and requires no thought. I mean, I can do laundry unconsciously while writing code in my head.
So since I moved out 22 years ago, my hypothesis has been that people who think housework is a full-time job are actually probably suffering from severe depression and/or anxiety.
They can participate, way more than what we usually see (my own upbringing was too lax on this in my opinion). I wonder why parents don't make their kids part of the household.
There's only one problem with that - it's not true. The author cites no sources for his claim and every source I've found contradicts him. The average number of hours actually worked has slightly declined in the US and significantly declined in Europe over the past few decades. In the broader historical arc, there has been a huge increase in leisure; the average working week throughout the 19th century was well in excess of 60 hours.
Although most working parents report feeling rushed, the majority say that they spend the right amount of time with their children and that parenting responsibilities do not interfere with their career advancement. College-educated whites are, by some margin, the group most likely to report difficulties in balancing work and parental responsibilities.
We might feel like we're increasingly stretched by the demands of work and home, but that perception simply isn't supported by any data I've been able to find. I'm not saying that we've perfected work-life balance, but the overarching trend is substantially positive.
This was especially true in the Northern European countries where snow and lack of daylight would make it virtually impossible to work during the winter.
I feel like attempting to compare modern quality of life to 19th century farmers is a fool's errand. Maybe we're working through the winter, but, as a whole it's very unlikely to kill us so I'm inclined to take that trade.
From one of the links: "For example, in the CES a person working two part-time jobs of 20 hours a week is counted as having two 20-hour jobs, but in the CPS, the same individual is counted as one worker working 40 hours."
So both surveys include part time jobs, not sure how that contradicts the original point.
Inflation measures are supposed to control for improvement in product quality & quantity so that you can represent the GDP of 1852 in 2018 dollar terms.... In 1993, a macbook pro would have been very valuable.
If you have a time machine with 20 laptops in the boot, that's enough to let you live like Biff in the almanac timeline. Does that mean anyone with a macbook is a millionaire in 1992 dollars?
This is not a solvable problem. It works ok for YoY inflation (that's the point) but, the phrase '2018 dollars' gets meaningless as we try to represent earlier years. Saying we are n% more wealthy than people in 1300, is just cheesy journalism mostly.
Anyway (long preamble, sorry)....
Just like trying to adjust inflation by 70 or 700 years is difficult, trying to account for hours worked and/leisure is difficult. Too much has changed.
Woman joined the workforce. Children left it. Work got homework added. Training became more of a leisure time activity. Commutes got longer. Lunches got longer. The first one is probably the biggest.
Btw there's an illustrative thread running through both... Childcare and elder care. These were done at home (mostly by women) as non economic activity. Now these are jobs. The generate GDP, work hours... But, children were being raised before. They are being raised now. It just didn't used to be counted as GDP/work hours.
I agree with you that as automation takes all the jobs, child and elder care will be the work everyone shifts to. I think we should be doing more of this now. Better elder care would help keep people on their right meds and could greatly reduce healthcare costs. Better child "care" could be lots of things but will lead to healthier, smarter, more inquisitive children that will become self supporting and out of bad paths saving society more there as well.
I think one thing that people miss slightly is that some of this is our own fault. Everyone is heavy on the chase (me incl.) of things. We want full meals in a box at our door without the annoyance of doing any work for it. Some of our need for extra work and both adults working comes from our demand that we have a huge house and two new cars and two huge vacations and everyone has an iPhone X and on and on. You have to either work more or spend less and we've generally chosen work more. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that but we need to accept the consequences.
I’m stuck in a dead end job right now. I will never be granted a shred of decision making capacity or autonomy.
It is a waiting game. Waiting for more assignments. Waiting until 5PM. Waiting for my paycheck. Waiting to get fired. Waiting to retire. Waiting to die.
(n * (Commute. Sit. Wait. Commute. Eat. Sleep.)) Die. Where n == the days I have left in this world.
The things I work on feel like absurd, meaningless boondoggles with no head and no tail. So here I am spinning my wheels as I hurtle toward a grave.
That I know this is my reality forces me to deeply question the society I participate in. If I am so bound, restricted, constrained in my actions and daily routines, why not just cut to the chase as die already. The repetitive script for how my invarient pattern of living shall progress is obvious. Do I really need to live through it 10,000 more times?
The less meaningful work I get done during the day, the less energy I have after 5. Most days, I'll make quick dinner, turn on YouTube, watch videos for 10 minutes, and suddenly it's 11pm.
You just described my life for the past 3 months. It's winter though, so I just attributed it to that. Also I'll be quitting my job soon and then go somewhere where I don't have to deal with dark, cold winters anymore.
I guess there's an upside to being a long-time single with no attachments.
Free time will turn to violence. I don't see a system of robots doing the work --- since it will be destroyed by the masses of media controlled unemployed workers. In the middle ages religion was used to tame the masses -- robots will need something similar.
What makes you stuck? You sound like you've accepted your fate. If you want to change things, just do it.
If your reality is so bad that you want to die, then how is taking action to potentially change things worse? A big part of this discussion is people want meaningful work and a meaningful life, but they want other people to give it to them. Why is that expected?
Ah yes "if your life sucks, just be one of the small percentage of people who succeed in overcoming the massive challenges stacked against you, there's nothing unreasonable about expecting that out of every individual".
Unless, of course, you're saying we need to start a civil war to free all the office workers...
If your life sucks so bad that you're sitting on Friday morning posting to a place called Hacker News, then your life really doesn't suck that much. You've already got more than most ever had, so leverage that.
Not a fan of learned helplessness or woe is me. If you want to change, you can. It might not be easy but if you feel like waiting until you die, there's not much to lose, anyway.
What does saying "my life sucks" solve? The world isn't kind to most people, you have to make the most out of it.
They're sharing their situation. Indicating to others that there's a problem is a part of getting it solved, and if that problem is systemic it's probably one we're all going to need to work together on.
The world isn't kind. But there's no reason we can't work to make it less so.
Anything can be meaningful. You might not think making sushi for 60 years is meaningful, but a guy named Jiro does.
Even if you have to have an "interesting" job, most people aren't but a few years of schooling out. Hell, we're in tech where you're a few years of study and practice from being world class and/or making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, you've got to work at it, but that's really meaningful work.
If only that was as easy as saying it. People have responsibilites and stomachs that don't like (naturally) staying empty. Sometimes you just can't do it.
Are there helpless people who depend directly on you to avoid suffering if you miss 2 or 3 paychecks? If not, then what are you going to do about this situation you're in?
I had similar thoughts about the meaning of it all. But I didn't question life per se, I questioned the rat race. "Why am I working all day?", "Why do I spend the best parts of the day in an office?", "Why can't I still afford a house even though I make good money?" and questions of that nature.
I wasn't as unhappy as you sound, I just didn't see the purpose of it (working) anymore.
And so I decided not to do it anymore. Instead, I've decided to buy a small amount of land, live sustainibly, start a market garden, and spend much more time with my family and integrate with nature more.
Life isn't bad, but it sounds like you're stuck in a rut. Perhaps you just need to find your passion, and make a plan to transition from where you are now, to where you want to be?
Started cheffing at 17, always wanted to code, self taught enough to be qualified as a chef and get a job programming for a fairly large company by 22.
It sucked. As you said, waiting for assignments, no decision making and just another cog in a very large wheel.
Went back to cheffing, I've now travelled all over Australia, lived in Japan for 6 years, met a woman who became my wife and is currently pregnant with our first.
I may work 70+ hours some weeks, but it's fun. I have ran 3 restaurant successfully as an executive chef, now I'm helping a family member with a take away and loving it(haute cuisine food from a take away? Can't plate as I useto but damn it tastes good at an affordable price).
Long story short I'm enjoying life now, seems you need to broaden your horizons work wise more than how life just is.
P.s when I get the urge, I still have a massive side project I work on, so that training in coding, definitely not wasted :-)
Makes me think of observations I've made about cooking in better restaurants. It doesn't pay well and the work requires skill/experience and long hours, and demand (at least here) is extremely high.
High demand, high skill... why doesn't it pay better? The only answer is that there must be some other benefits to the field. They have to pay people better to work in an office because office work sucks a lot more.
You ought to watch "Zero Theorem" for some comic reflection...
That aside, I think work has been debased because the values of currencies have been debased by central banks. The 1% fully and significantly invested in the stock market may be feeling somewhat differently, though.
Also, I think to some extent that the tech dreams promised by my childhood have largely been replaced by corporate simulacra that are in no way as satisfying.
As long as you are physically capable of trying to make changes to your context, activities and expectations, there's a way out of that routine. Your "ideal life" may be way out of reach, but it is about as far away, from your current situation, as the opposite end of giving up. If you can consider walking in one direction, please consider the opposite as well.
The inertia of your current situation probably drains your energy and motivation to even experiment with making changes, but it is worth to find a trained professional that can help break that cycle. There's no shame in seeking therapy or support of some kind.
You always have a choice. It's up to you if stay in the same place or if you accept your "fate" (which isn't fixed) and just complain and cry about it.
At the risk of sounding banal, I believe it's worth checking to see if you have a severe depression. Because that's how depression feels. There are people out there who derive great pleasure from writing uninspired code. Not only doesn't work need to be the main source of meaning in your live (in addition to providing income), its perceived value is heavily dependent on your psychological and physiologial condition. In fact, I'm afraid that, thae way you are now, you might not be able to enjoy yourself even if your situation changed for the better.
This is a bleak message, yet it's true: most people do not like their jobs very much. They can just deal with it because they're not totally depressed. And the reason is, surprisingly often, simple brain chemistry. At least try some more roads before talking of suicide.
I think those who "derive great pleasure from writing uninspired code" are mostly enjoying their well paying job.
Very few people actively enjoy laboring for others. That's why they need to pay you to do it.
I enjoy building my own projects, but I have never found work stimulating unless I maneuvered myself into a position where I could learn something new. Unfortunately once you learn that new thing, and then refactor it as far as you can, you're back to boring uninspired work again.
Not to mention the parts of work which are actively terrible. Like hunting down a bug in a dependency.
Well I know people who are perfectly fine with hinting bugs while laboring for another, who find some obscure pleasure in repetitive work that is normally considered boring. It's not incomprehensible.
But yes, they are rewarded handsomely. It's a rate trait, after all.
If you're contemplating leaving this world, that would be considered a crisis in most places. Look up crisis hotlines in your area and please get help...
I want a world where it is more clear what we should work on. Most startups come up with solutions looking for a problem. Yet if people or companies formulated their problems more directly, we wouldn't have to guess at them. As a consequence, work would be more meaningful and more effective.
I don't think there's enough meaningful work to do. Or, whatever meaningful work there is can't be done because it doesn't pay the bills. The reality is that people work for money. Companies exist to make money.
Startups do what they do because they hope to find gold.
What people want, say they want, and how they act are separate things. For example, no one has ever said "I want to spend hundreds of dollars on a pointless mobile game", yet that is what a lot of people end up doing. Conversely, people have plenty of problems that they are not willing to spend (enough) money on solving, at least not until it is socially common to do so.
However, I think you're on to something here -- something like a reversed kickstarter; anyone could post something they would want to have and how much they would spend on it, more people could join the campaign and creators could get to work on solving it. Probably people already tried it, but off the top of my head I can think of about 10 reasons why it won't work...
The problem is that most startups don't contribute anything useful to the world, they are either plays against venture capital or plays in an overflowing entertainment market, with the word "entertainment" defined very liberally. IOW, Google, Facebook, the whole lot are pretty incidental to the world.
It already it. Most people middle class and up work way more than they strictly need to for simple wellbeing. It's just that our standards and expectation for wellbeing shifts, and shifts quickly.
I feel that's more a symptom of people doing work they loathe. When there's intrinsic motivation for doing work, people are productive for the overwhelming majority of the time spent working, and breaks magically evaporate.
Not at all. I think too many technologists (including myself these days) sit behind far too many layers of abstractions.
Coding a quick Perl script to solve a real world problem on a factory floor and watching a dozen machinists start grinning and get way more productive is something I've been paid to do, and I never got unmotivated by. One of those jobs where you simply stay until the job is done, and don't feel put out in the least you got home at 11pm.
It's when you're slogging away 12 factors removed on some crap you know is utterly meaningless to anyone - even if it's in tooling you like - that's when I get severe motivational problems. I'd rather work as a cashier at a gas station where at least I can see the effect I have on society with my labor.
I'd argue that this definition of "productive" is insufficient. Conveniently, the link to the study is broken (and to "vouchercloud.com", not BLS, the stated source of the study), so it's hard to check the numbers.
My point is, few people can walk up to a keyboard and program "productively" for three hours -- and then do the same thing the next day again indefinitely. Hidden in those productive hours is a lot of informal coordination, necessary for those three hours to be actually productive.
By no means is it given that 8 hours is the optimal workday, nor that the way we generally structure work is the most efficient, but luckily, our field is especially receptive to radical experiments, so someone will surely try this any day now. (/s)
>Most people middle class and up work way more than they strictly need to for simple wellbeing.
Sort of. For the week, I would agree, for a lifetime, not so sure about that. I mean what happens when you are unable to work? That could come sooner or later, but when it does come, you will need a chunk of change to get you through the rest of your life. Also, at the other end of life, children can't work until 16, so someone needs a chunk of change to take care of them too.
The trick is to abstain from all luxuries in life (thus, the "strictly need" qualifier). Of course, we don't really want to do without the luxuries, so we work to earn their cost -- and we also don't want to do without them in old age/during sickness, and so we even more to have savings. But a roof over your head and beans in your bowl, including savings for a few decades of this without working, isn't really hard to achieve at all.
As a small example, I met someone at the gym the other day who told me living in the South Bay without a car would suck. I was surprised; I've never learned how to drive, nor have I owned a car, and I consider this a blessing. I bike 25 minutes to work, 20 minutes to the gym, and less to most other places I need to go. And I'm healthier for it.
I never became acclimated to owning a car, and every time I consider buying one, I just can't justify the value add. I don't even mean that financially it wouldn't net out (it certainly wouldn't), but the cognitive overhead of having to manage yet another thing doesn't really appeal to me. And then there's the thought of passively sitting in a box for about an hour a day in lieu of being out in the open air, which sounds awful.
Part of the problem, I think, is that most people like work. When people sense their hours are spent on fruitless or simple tasks, or they're not valued for it ("low skill" jobs) it's frustrating. Accomplishing things, making progress, solving problems ... these are very satisfying aspects to "work.". But how many jobs offer that regularly?
I have a more aggressive timeline than most on the spread of automation (a catch-all for job replacement, obsolescence, changing labor market). I'm of the opinion there will be a significant shift on our lifetime with whatever social repercussions and accommodations follow. But I don't think people will ever stop "working."
After long unemployment period and bad times, I need work, not the social thing, just the activity.
I guess to some, the fact to be doing something is better than the job being interesting, a career, well paying .. (as long as it's not to extreme of course)
btw, I believe that we're wired to like work as a basis for social bonding (if you believe that social bonding was selected to help for survival, and work is basically mutualized survival). So doing something in group is probably always good as long as the group factor is good enough (aka not being slaves)
There is nothing wrong with working and liking your work. I have a passion for music and coding, working all day. Problem is that most people need to work for another reason; $$$ instead of passion, to avoid ending up in the streets. That's more like slavery.
No. Work is a hobby for me. I enjoy the process of working, progressing, doing something. I don't really have any other hobbies that I wish I could be doing all day. We have to have something to wake up and do everyday, otherwise life is very boring and just a waiting game until the end of our days.
If people don't enjoy their work, their mission should be to keep looking until they find something that suits them. It's worth the effort finding something that you enjoy doing everyday.
Sort of, I’ve washed dishes for a living, bussed tables at an Outback steakhouse, worked as a line cook, stocked groceries at Kroger, and am now a professional software engineer and hobbyist artist.
My favorite gig was probably stocking groceries, as I enjoyed my coworkers and working at night.
Almost all of these jobs have been “truly boring”, but I’ve also been unemployed and completely without direction. That period of my life was very difficult, and I found that work, no matter how boring the job is, afforded me a dignity and purpose that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Of course, others may feel differently, and I understand that.
I like to work. If I had a choice, I would be using my skills for something more directly beneficial to mankind than what I do now. Unfortunately, that just doesn't pay as well, and I have student loans and other financial obligations to worry about.
Yeah, I agree with you there, but it seems to me that power and politics are a fact of life, like the air that we breathe or food that we eat. Maybe we can clean up the air or cook nicer things, but they will always be there.
No, everyone likes work. We call it "hobbies" when its not formally productive and "vocations" when it is. Capitalism, as a system, is awful at allocating this work that people love to the people who love it. They either can't at all, or they are forced to fit it around wasted time, or they have to gamble on trying to build it up from nothing, and often losing their stake and their beloved work.
The idea being that we automate, design away or do without as much as possible of the scutwork and pay the remainder handsomely. Then people can do the things they like - which may well be highly useful, they just aren't what capitalism will pay for.
The utopia vision as I understand it behind UBI is that automation takes care of most / all of the work people don't want to do.
I think the biggest challenge to this utopia vision (assuming automation gets to this point) is more that, frankly, labor is not wealth. Land is land for instance regardless of what is automated or not. Rent seeking for various things is rather common, most of which automation will not touch. I can envision strong resistance to any sort of UBI scheme from this group (some of this group frankly seem to not even care for our current safety nets now).
Before we go through a true "post work" phase, we'll probably go through a phase where service oriented jobs are the norm -- this is also harder to automate away completely, although probably not near impossible like tackling assets and rent-seeking. The main problem here is that this side of the workforce is currently rather undervalued IMHO. So if one wants improvements in the world of work, I personally think putting more efforts here would be better vs. banking on UBI.
Or, with enough automation, the world would be making leaps of progress in a variety of areas of human interest, because everybody is pursuing their true interests.
> Capitalism, as a system, is awful at allocating this work that people love to the people who love it.
It's actually pretty good at it. The really fulfilling jobs like nursing or teaching go to those who are willing to sacrifice most other luxuries to do them; those who don't get a fulfilling job get more consumption to make up for it. Enjoyable work is a commodity like anything else.
> Capitalism, as a system, is awful at allocating this work that people love to the people who love it.
It's significantly better at it than the alternatives.
Even UBI. Sure UBI sounds great in principle, you'll be given enough to live on and you can spend your time doing whatever takes your fancy, but in large-scale practice I don't see it working.
Making the majority of the population dependent on the government for their income is not something that has historically worked well.
One, they're not dependent on the government. Only on a society organized to redistribute wealth so as to prevent scarcity, in the broadest sense of the term. Could be anarchic or contributory in a different social climate.
Two, the idea is not that people will goof off all day. Some yeah. Most, no. Most people will find work they like doing and do it. What does go away, however, is the fear of failure, unemployment and poverty. So they will have much better options to search for their most effective niche, rather than leaping in panic upon the first offer.
One, there is no practical way to roll this out across an entire society without government involvement. Businesses and wealthy benefactors can make it work for small trials, but large scale society level in a western democracy? It will need government involvement, and even if you try to do it without them, they will stick their nose in it anyway whether you like it or not.
Two, ideas and reality are very different things. The idea of communism is that everyone is provided for and people give what they can and only take what they need. Sounds great, very altruistic. In reality, it's been a nightmare everywhere it has ever been implemented at a societal level because the idea fails to take in to account human nature. UBI proponents overlook or understate this factor too.
>And finally, beyond all these dysfunctions, loom the most-discussed, most existential threats to work as we know it: automation, and the state of the environment. Some recent estimates suggest that between a third and a half of all jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence in the next two decades.
I've yet to read any research without crippling flaws that suggests this kind of prediction isn't rooted in fantasy.
Comes down to urban planning, the west is depressing because you move from box to box in your mobile box. If the systems were less efficient we would rely on each other more and perhaps feel useful, a third world city is a great place to live, mentally.
A former Turkish colleague who moved from Turkey to Germany told me the same. The material side of things is covered well in Germany. And because of this, because basically everyone has all their needs covered by the system, people do not need to rely on each other – and they don’t. The vast majority has the means to help themselves and never have to ask anyone else for help.
My colleague felt alone, even though he lived with his girlfriend. I think our material abundance fosters isolation. There is no reason go to your neighbor and knock on their door. You live isolated in your home, you move anonymously through traffic, you work in a closed environment, you go home, and the cycle repeats. There is little room for accidentally making friends or even just having conversations.
This glorious utopia will last for all of five minutes until the last surviving SJW decides robots need rights.
And honestly, would xir be wrong? If we ever get to the point where robots can fully take over most human jobs even intellectual ones, we will have had to reach a level of artificial intelligence where even many not so radical religions and philosophies will wonder whether we are exploiting them.
When Tesla delved and Google span, who was then the gentleman?
This gets into how you identify a human (I'm saying for the sake of simplicity that humans are the only things eligible for rights, and ignoring animal rights and such) Is there something inherently human about humans? How about coma patients whose functions are limited? Is there some necessary set of functions a thing must have to qualify as a human? That seems to get into dangerous territory for some handicapped people.
The reason this matters is it's conceivable that an AI in a robotic frame could emulate practically all the behaviors we associate with a human (including behavior to display artifacts humans interpret as emotions, like smiling or crying). At that point, is such a thing a human? Or is it merely a fully-realized model of one? Does it make a difference?
This is the subject of tons of speculative science fiction. From a strictly computer science perspective, though, you can easily define a "square" class that fully implements all the behaviors of the geometric concept of a square. That doesn't make instances of it a square, though. They're merely digital models of squares. This is also the significance of the famous "There is no spoon" scene in The Matrix, when Neo has a realization that everything in the Matrix is a model which he can reach into and alter the properties of. Therefore, there's a strong argument to be made that from an objective perspective, even an AI that perfectly mimics human behavior is just a perfect model and not a human. However, humans being emotional creatures the objective argument will almost certainly not matter in that scenario.
This also has implications for the science fiction concept of "copied personalities", which Black Mirror loves playing with. If you make a digital copy of someone's mind, do they still have rights? I'd argue no for the above reasons, but again, there's an emotional angle which will usually override the scientific angle.
You've pretty much described the Chinese room argument. That aside, we have the power to limit such coming robots to be 'dumb' in a sense, where they are only capable of doing the tasks given to them. Let's hope we can manage that.
Yes that is in essence all that needs to be said. Work is just one manifestation of competition between individuals driving us to outdo others.
Of course if we weren't occupied by work all day then we'll find something else to compete in and "stress" ourselves about. And don't we already do this to some extent through innumerable athletic/mental feats like climbing mountains, and other ways that are essentially displays of wealth like a vacation in Haiti and so on. This is a simplification, one can successfully argue that many of these activities have "inherent" benefit besides signaling but that aspect is usually not spoken of at all so I emphasize it more here.
So the stressors of everyday life (whether they come from work or other means of competition) are an inescapable fact of human life. Too bad if you don't like it.
It is interesting that the article’s discussion of the history of work begins with Marx, as the modern conception of work lies in the industrial revolution, of which he was a crucial byproduct. His entire Weltanschauung presumed that organized work was the default activity of humans, and with that as a given, proceeded from there. Modern economics, including neoliberal economics, uses his vocabulary by default, making discussions of alternatives, in a weirdly Whorfian way, hard to have.
This article also correctly places the roots of the conception of work as the core of human identity as side effects of Europe’s Protestant movement. Amazingly, given that this is the Guardian, they failed to invoke the lazy trope of “colonialism” for the spread of this culture worldwide — for in this case it is accurate. The British empire, in particular, once it became run by the government, spread this model to the “lazy natives” as part of a cultural package. (It is no coincidence that the standard worldwide business attire — as with military uniforms — is based on 19th century British aristocratic fashion).
The final piece of course is the cultural reform required for UBI. Just as our conception of work is modern, our conception of money as a reserve of wealth is modern. Even back when Augustus personally paid off he national debt, the conceptions of money and power were backwards to where they are today (“Plutocrat” is another Industrial Age idea). Money was a way to show off your power, not a way to acquire it.
But money also serves a more much more important function as a signalling mechanism (a change in price indicates that there is more demand for T-shirts and less for TV sets) — one of the many fatal flaws in communism was a failure to understand this, and the current obsession with banking in the western economies demonstrates a related misunderstanding. When we have a robotic economy with a marginal cost of production close to zero, why should “wealth” reflect a bank balance? What would be the point of accumulating one?
Because many things that are pleasurable or satisfying to do for yourself are not so much when you scale them. That’s why people get paid to do them now.
Your original question contained the assumptions that, with an UBI, no services will be created, and no one will be paid for services.
None of these are a necessary consequence of people receiving an unconditional amount of money regularly. People can still may want to work for luxuries, or I might want to pay others to sway their personal projects in the direction I prefer.
Plus, maybe some services may be "essential" only under the current working scene, but might become less so if everybody adjusted their way of life to a slower rate of consumerism (buying more virtual goods rather than physical, traveling less, working from home, buying local, etc). A lower income level could be sustainable under those conditions, if some percentage of it is guaranteed.
Either there's a market-clearing price for the goods and services you want or there isn't. If you want something that someone would have to put themselves out to produce, then either you make it worthwhile for them to put themselves out by that much (perhaps by paying them money, perhaps by producing your own goods and services in the categories that are inconvenient or tedious to produce) or you decide the thing is not worth that much to you.
The belief is that this category of goods and services would be rare - that most things are not so inconvenient or tedious to produce, that most demand could be covered without making people put themselves out a lot. Of course it's possible this is wrong.
Let’s the robots do them. If I want a person to play me music i can find someone who’ll do it at mynclearinprice, or play the music myself. Or be happy with the robot produced music (which can hardly be worse than the focus group produced pop music of today)
To be fair, money as a signalling mechanism is a useful tool, but it can't be as neatly separated from politics as libertarians believe. Most politically relevant agreements are either made behind closed doors or benefit from insider information, so their signaling does not improve market efficiency for all involved - just the well-connected clique; and the "creative accounting" by major firms is responsible for distortions in what companies are being considered efficient, again allowing a small oligarchy to gain market advantages even when nominally participating in a free market.
I didn’t say it would be the only signalling mechanism, I meant to split of the wealth aspect. Though again, when the robots can make paper clips on their own there will be less need for Big Paperclip to form a cartel.
Forceful reorganization of society inevitably turns into bloodshed in 100% of cases, and that rarely improves standards of living. The human civilization is in a state of constant chaos and nobody can tell or influence where it will be taken next. Accidental discoveries and pointless inventions have shaped our culture, and with it our minds and way of life with nobody being able to predict or control them. It's like a childhood fantasy - when I'm the king I'll make you all...
Society cannot be ruled in a top-down manner, period.
Reorganization of society need not be implemented in a top-down manner. Encouraging small changes in the activities of individuals can gradually sum to major changes over time. We have the brainpower to enact a project of this type, not every revolution has to be at gunpoint.
Unpopular opinion: It is easy to work less or nearly work nothing and still get by fine (in the context of the modern western world!), the issue is more that people spend their money in bad ways and make bad long term decisions. If you live reasonable and don't spend money on things you don't need you also don't need to work so much...And I often heard from people now "I don't even know why I work so much, I don't need the money". I am sure most people would prefer to work less if the system would allow it.
In America rent and healthcare are two big expenses that you can't escape from. You could live in rural areas and then you don't have a job or you do but you're spending most of your income on car expenses.
If you have children you can't complain if you have to work more. It is a decision, kids cost money, everybody knows that. Same goes for location to live in, what you eat, if you want a car...my point is : you don't NEED much. Most people could live comfortable with less work, the problem is people WANT too much and that is exacerbated by this throw-away society. What most don't get is: the world owes you nothing, you should be happy with the minimum, anything beyond not being hungry and having shelter is an WANT that's extra you don't NEED. People are spoiled
I agree that a huge amount of the suffering in the world, possibly most of it, can be traced back to bad decisions on the part of someone who should have known better. A lot of this definitely comes down to those 'wants'. Right now I have a household budget problem because someone wanted a new luxury item, it's terrible.
All the same, let's not forget there are huge numbers of people in terrible situations they did not bring upon themselves. These are the people worth helping, even if it means a bunch of selfish, badly behaved people get helped along with them. At some point, mitigating the consequences of people (predictably) behaving badly has to be looked at as basic damage control.
Yes I agree, there are people with bad luck but I was not talking about those, I meant more in general. I am not saying one should not help, the topic was about work anyway, my point was simply that if people step back with their wants they'd have to work less. I just hear too often someone lament about how he/she has no money but then they have all kinds of luxury items... car, especially if someone lives in a big city, is nothing but a money burning machine and if they say "but I want one" well then they gotta pay for that with their time and nerves at work
I can either drive a car and commute to work for 30-40 minutes each way or I can take public transportation and commute for 1.5-2 hours each way. Additionally, in places without robust transportation, you literally cannot work without a car.
You are correct that I do not need a car, but you are wrong to assume it is trivial to lose 2+ hours of free time each day as just another luxury.
Frankly, your position on needs vs wants seems like a convenient excuse to look down on other people who have different concepts of value.
There is very little, in the western world, that we NEED to survive. You do not need electricity, for example, but no reasonable person would call it a luxury -- point being it is more subjective than you imply. Would also help your argument if you realize your perspective is extremely privileged.
Some people have kids who did not want them, and yes it was a mistake but not as much a decision as something that happened -- they may not have the monetary, intellectual or moral foundation to handle an unwanted pregnancy. So this woman, maybe a single mother, now has a child and is struggling to pay her bills, a paycheck (or car repair, or medical expense) from being evicted.
Your speech would not be relevant to a person in such a situation and there are many many many such people.
People who eat out 5-10 times a week don't get to complain about being broke, but how is that a new insight? To me it trivializes the real struggles of the working poor.
But the struggle of the working poor is not because of the amount of work (topic), but because of a unfair economic system. p.s. if you read above you'd knew I been in such situations too, I kind of grew up with that
How can one say something such irresponsible? A lot of the problems in the world and peoples personal life are caused by reproduction. It is not a right but a choice and this choice most seem unable to make with a clear rational mind, if anything people need oversight on that topic. But apparently ridiculous "ethical" and religious positions are more important than the coming global(!) humanitarian crisis, I'd like to ask people like you again about what you think once people start eating each other and rot away by the billions.
You've lived a charmingly sheltered life if you believe the majority of people live in that situation. The social support and education that allow people to easily survive while hardly working are not evenly distributed throughout society.
I live in the most corrupt and poorest country of all Western Society, I come from a poor family, my whole life was fighting, I have been starving, I have been freezing (couldn't afford heating, sleeping bag in winter). I don't blame anyone, I don't expect anything from society. I spend years acquiring skills, knowledge and experience and now it pays off. The whole knowledge of the world is available online to anyone, if someone can't make something out of that then they have to try harder.
In a world without jobs, there would still be projects. It's a fallacy the idea that people will not create things if they're not compelled by the risk of starving to death.
The problem preventing a jobless society is the reverse: what happens to you if your personal projects are not valued by society enough to pay you for them, and therefore you can't sustain yourself from them?
Someone without the skills to create marketable projects can decide to work towards projects created by others, and be compensated for it; that's what a "job" is.
For a jobless society, you should be able to pursue your own projects without starving in case that they do not sell. These projects may involve pursuing leisure, starting charitable deeds, or taking care of your family, all without the direct beneficiaries paying for it. For this to happen, we should:
1) find a way to provide a basic livelihood for everyone in that situation (Basic Income is the most talked about); and
2) value people pursuing their own projects, more than we value people being the most productive* they can possibly be.
*(where "productive" is defined as "building stuff that people will pay for". This is the most common understanding of productivity, but I find it somewhat circular).
In essence, in order to exist, a jobless society should value you being happy more than it values you accelerating the velocity of commercial capital. This doesn't require radically new economic theories; but it requires an adjustment of the parameters by which we measure "efficiency" in what we consider an "efficient economy".
I don't necessarily see it as a fallacy. Not because people are compelled by risk of starving to death but because why would they create when an AI or a machine can do it better? What would be the point? I tend to agree with Orwell:
"No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements."[0]
If a society is jobless thanks to automation, I see this as the inevitable fate.
And as for a society that values my happiness; I don't see being happy as a worthwhile goal for an individual to aim for. To be happy and content for a long period of time is, in my eyes, akin to being dead in the water.
[0]: In "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell (I think it's chapter 12?)
If work were disconnected from the profit motive then the quality of work would dramatically rise. The need to make money entails mediocrity and holds us back. Those with a love of their work aren't motivated by money and their love always leads to great works.
This is a good first -radical- approach, although I'm sure that the way to go is a world without money (or any exchange currency for that matter).
Instead,a world where you "work" in anything you really like (without having to worry about getting paid or not), where everything is virtually "free" and achievable, as long as you mantain an active "working" status. Think of it as a 1 - working, 0 - not working. If you are in 1 status, you can acquire anything you need (and even want) in modic proportions.
The obsolescence of humans in the workforce means that we are gradually being stripped of the power to put a roof over our heads and bread in our plates while capital becomes independent.
At this point, feeding non-productive humans still benefit the economy (by preventing riots and allowing the productive individuals to contribute), but if the vast majority of humanity does not participate in the economy anymore, I don't see why the market would keep on feeding it. And at that point we would be so dependent on automation that we'd all starve to death.
Seeing the score jump up and down, this seems controversial, I'll expand a bit:
Our economy is a dissipative structure, not unlike fire, nuclear chain reactions and living organisms. It consumes energy (dissipates it, actually, increasing total entropy) in order to perpetuate itself.
Its real currency isn't money, but energy. Money and finance are tools to set its goals and direct its actions.
Fundamentally, supply is energy/matter/recipes to transform either.
Demand stems from survival instinct and reflexes. Humans demand material security, the market provides it in exchange for labor. The economy demands to be kept running through our work and keeps us mostly safe in exchange.
Those instincts/reflexes were acquired by anything alive thanks to evolution.
Currently, companies are subject to heavy selection pressure. They've been morphing at an impressive pace thanks to technological progress, becoming ever more efficient thanks to automation. Only the most efficient stay afloat. At some point, feeding humans will not be the most efficient way to keep themselves up and running, and when that occurs, we will be too dependent to survivie without them.
The primary and secondary sectors are becoming autonomous fast (autonomous tractors, trucks and mining equipment), and so is the industry. The tertiary sector is only useful as long as humans themselves are useful to the first two sectors.
An viewpoint I want to raise; what about representation? Traditionally, those who work and make money have been in some way represented in the state and the general fabric of life. Those who don't, are generally don't, or rather, someone else represents for them.
I'd all for a universal paycheck, if it weren't for that nagging suspicion that it won't work out like in Star Trek. That the powers that be will decide something altogether unpleasant for the non-working majority.
In regards to UBI, I was disturbed by a comment that Jaron Lanier made in the latest Ezra Klein Show [1] (starting at minute 55).
He said that some "known" Silicon Valley folks have expressed that the recent opioid epidemic is a positive because these addicts aren't needed will fall out of the workforce, thereby making the transition to the "world without jobs" easier.
UBI is really only a stopgap to preserve the scaffolding of the existing system (and its inequality). What we really need is Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Every time it is different. How does this post contribute at all? Are you really saying things stay the same despite the HUGE, game-changing advances of technology? It's like you just dismiss all the information and discussion to post a pithy "lol communism suxx" response.
The original communist claim was, essentially, that we could build paradise if only the workers/people owned the tools. That... didn't work out.
Now the claim seems to be that it will work if only the people own the automated factories. That's close enough to the same claim for "this time it's different" to be a valid description of the claim.
> Are you really saying things stay the same despite the HUGE, game-changing advances of technology?
Agriculture was a huge, game-changing advance of technology. So was industrialization. We've seen them before. So claiming that this huge advance will make work obsolete requires a bit more than "but look, there's a huge advance!"
> It's like you just dismiss all the information and discussion...
I've seen lots of discussion, but not much information. Rhetoric, but not information.
I mean, yes, factories are becoming more automated. That's true. It's not leading to a world where nobody needs to work, though. (Current US unemployment is below 4%. That's not looking like evidence for a world where nobody needs to work.)
What does this even mean? It's a very specific metric, not sure it is backing up your argument in the way you think. There are a lot of discouraged or under employed workers who would disagree that things are not changing in a fundamental way.
Unfortunately, Capital exists to continue the existence of Capital, and once UBI is necessary for this, states will not hesitate to bring it about; Marx didn't really foresee its concessionary nature which has kept it going for the last hundred years, with no end in sight.
There is literally no argument given in this sprawling diatribe for who is going to provide for society.
Unless there is some new slave class that's going to do our work for us, your can't have productive society without someone working.
There are simply too many humans and not enough resources for everyone to homestead or farm, and even then, people have to work for themselves, and it would end up in more work.
The tools are providing and will provide. They do not provide 100% of the labor, but their share is increasing.
Re: your second point, homesteading or farming on the individual level makes no sense, that is why farming is specialized and scaled up. Why would this no longer bte the case?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadStarve in the morning, starve in the afternoon, starve in the evening, self-criticise instead of dinner.
FTFY.
Ask any jobless person for whom no job exists how they feel about life.
Perhaps you see yourself primarily as a mother, or an artist, or ...
your son and son's will not have the same perspective
Distance between our respective positions on this topic is enough that I have to spend considerably more effort to communicate using words a more complete explanation.
p.s. I love to edit as much as I am able to, and dislike those that are prejudiced otherwise.
machines have us beat on speed. however, let us not be blinded by this singularly awesome edge machines provide.
Reading between the lines, I think full automation is entirely possible in the setting but the world naturally settled on a 20 hour week to give everyone the benefits of purpose etc.
I am by all means as capitalist as I would imagine are the majority of the audience on this forum but I cannot deny the fact that there are disadvantages to our way of life and without exploring other ways it is hard to conclude which one is better.
Here is another provoking thought. Imagine that we expand the human lifespan well over 500 years. Would you be still doing what you are doing today at the same age? While there will be certainly wealthy people if we live in a capitalistic society, we can also imagine that some people may decide to do a lot of different things in their first 100 years and many other things in the second 100 years and so on. But that system may not be viable. What if 1 in 5 people get to be rich and live wealthy? I would not say that this will work but in your 500 years, you will have 100 that the society will allow you just "because" to be very wealthy and live a wealthy lifestyle. These ideas sound crazy for sure but who knows.
A friend who was a construction engineer builds extensions and does building work for relatives.
My mother when she was able lent her extensive knowledge of countryside planning to the local council, helped on patients fora for hospitals, cared for more elderly members of the community.
They all do "jobs" that can be paid for, none of them needed to financially. They all seem content in their roles.
Being penniless and being jobless are different things. Moreover, not all people choose to find identity in the jobs they do for survival.
It might be like:
- What's your recent?
- How's your hobjob?
- How's your AI farm?
If I wasn't required to have a job? If I could live a full life without one? I wouldn't mind on bit.
What they got wrong is that the things we ended up prioritizing for the rest of the time are luxuries, that costs money and that we thus need to work to afford, rather than merely leisure time. This then pushes us to want to live in (expensive) cities, to be near better jobs and luxury spending opportunities, which again means we have to earn more to afford this.
I chose to alter mine slightly, cutting from 37.5 to 35 (I could have gone properly part-time to 20 if I didn't need the money), and everything is just pro rated.
Perhaps it's a Europe vs US thing, but it's fairly common to request changes to your career design to allow for flexible working. Obviously it works best for knowledge worker jobs, but it's also applicable to all kinds of shift-pattern work too.
The argument of course is that if you need multiple people to cover the role, the overhead cost is more. However, on a twofold point: many employers know about the BS around productive hours and don't always need cover (I work with people who work shorter hours than I and they aren't covered), and larger organisations (the unsexy ones) can abosrb this without barely a glance.
Let's not leave the radical alternatives to the racists and nationalists.
This is the real message of the article. Its not about giving everybody a robot butler, its about reorganising society to allow us to do all of the things that need to be done. We don't need to have lots of people working long poorly paid shifts at Wallmart, but we do need people to look after the young and the elderly. At the moment we have a tendency to look at working class people who dont work as morally lacking, when often they have quite a lot of useful (non-paid) things to be getting on with. We need to change the way we think about what makes somebody a useful member of society
Because there are other types of profit, more subjective ones, like feeling good, emotional well-being, long-term sustainability etc, which are more elusive by definition but nevertheless super important.
Because if you're really talking about a lack "profit" in the very general (aka inviting a straight loss), then the question simply becomes: Who will pay for this loss, and why?
In the end we have moved from women not being able to join the workforce to women not being able to not join the workforce. It doesn't seem an obvious improvement to me, although I should mention I'm not a woman.
If we're going to talk about "reorganizing society", it should factor in EVERY person in the world. Not just the lucky 10% in first world countries.
I don't know about you but the homes, roads, cars, plumbing, healthcare, energy, food, and most other things vital to our lifestyle do not come from China or Taiwan. And even where Asian products are popular (e.g. big home appliances), European alternatives do exist.
I feel like people in the tech sphere can't look or see beyond smartphones, laptops, and other tech gadgets.
I can think of Miele. That's the only one that's propely German still. Bosch/Siemens are both very much Asian on the inside. They do some assembly in Germany as far as I know. Can't think of any other European brands in this space.
Subpar dishwasher (comparable Siemens one cleans dishes visibly better), very subpar washing machine (integrated dryer has almost 0 effect on how wet laundry is), kitchen hood above stove stopped working completely after 6 months (of course this one is most costly to change because its integrated to the wall). All bought in 2016 for flat reconstruction, none of them basic models, rather higher ones (but not highest). I am not that rich to afford managing of those crappy things.
Never, ever again (I had same type of experience with Whirlpool cca 10 years ago). For +-reasonable pricing, Siemens & Bosch, for absolute quality and reliability, Miele.
Best example - the mobile phone. Even the poor can get one that is better than the best smartphone of a few years ago.
Access to content has seen a similar trend - we now all have access to massive amounts of information, videos and online conversation. No money needed, so the poor get immediately the same level of access as the rich.
Except for everywhere where poor connectivity and low data caps (+expensive plans relative to the income) are common.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186508
Where do you think the problem lies?
If you look at the instantaneous\* derivative, it's not the fact that you owe the federal government $2M for that MD that counts but rather your monthly obligation. Debt doesn't matter, required repayment per unit of time does - so almost like cash-basis accounting.
Finding a $100 on the street or borrowing $100 from a friend are the same in terms of their addition to your instantaneous wealth, it's the fact that one needs to be repaid that detracts from your "actual" wealth, and the repayment period matters. Compare the lifestyle of two neighbors working at the same institution making the same amount of money that each took out $500k mortgages to buy their identical houses, only one took it out for 15 years and the other for 30. On day 1, they both take the same hit to their net worth, but that doesn't change their wealth derivative in and of itself, it's the rate of paying it back that you should be counting.
That explains why one college educated individual can get a loan for $1000 from the bank and at time 0 they are, under this metric, better off than someone that needed to hit up a payday loans place for the same loan but at a higher interest rate. They both "earned" the same amount of money, and may even "spend" it on the same thing at the same rate, but when you take the repayment period into account (let's say 1 year vs 2 weeks, respectively) you can see why the graduate student is measurably better off.
Just like stocks you hold aren't actually contributing to your day-to-day wealth (and as such aren't taxed) but it's when you cash out that you've either made or lost money.
\* let's define an "instant" as a month, just to make things easier.
Yes, and (ideally) currency in an economy is a liquid representation of value. A college degree translates (after accounting for inefficiencies) to higher income potential, more efficient spending, etc.
EDIT: typo, "liquid representation of value," not "wealth"
In this respect, having debt is a positive sign, because banks evaluate loans based on expected ability to repay, i.e. future income streams.
So, I'm going to guess the problem may lie somewhere other than with eight really rich people. But we don't really need to do the math on this one, do we? It doesn't even pass the sniff test - "these eight people are LITERALLY THE WORST" is just far too uncomplicated a proposition to accurately reflect the reality of a human world which, though many things, is never simple.
Thats just the top 8 people...Take the sum of the rest of the the global 1% or even 10% and do your math...
OH nm, the math has already been done.
280 trillion in global wealth / 6 billion people = 46k per person
And the top 10% has 86% percent of it, and the inequality is just growing exponentially.
I'm not advocating that wealth should be equally distributed OR that capitalism is all bad..however, that in-equality is STAGGERING....unregulated capitalism with no income redistribution is a one way ticket to a third world PLANET.
https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and...
What I see is that Wal-Mart makes a ton of money and their employees have to be on food stamps and still work 80 hour weeks while the owners reap all of the profit.
To me this is simply unregulated capitalism which nowdays has become thinly masked slavery.
Well, considering that financial and monetary policies are aimed at deregulation, and that financialization of the economy in developed countries is a thing, it would appear that unregulated capitalism is precisely what is causing massive inequality.
Um, why? Because you're one of the lucky few to whom $165 is not a significant sum of money?
Paul Graham has an essay about this error, how people thinks that there's a fixed amount of money. Once you understand that wealth is created and how, you can't talk like that with a straight face.
He fails to even begin to discuss capital, return on capital, and capital ownership as drivers in economic inequality. Basically it feels like a piece written by a smart guy who has no idea what he's talking about but feels emboldened because "economists are all idiots".
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we...
> a $150 cash grant to poor women in the northern part of [Uganda] doubled their earnings within a year, while one-off $382 transfers to 16- to 35-year-olds were associated with 40-percent higher earnings four years later.
i'm not saying we should do it, but your analysis doesn't account for any knock on effects, and so is itself far too simple.
When in fact top 10% richest helped much more people along the way than all average combined. And the consequence is being rich.
Instead of complaining about inequality (aka making the rich poorer), better to think about how to make the poor richer.
That's complete bullshit. That's maybe how you wish things were. But it's not. I'm in the top 10%, and I've done nothing for it other than having been born in a wealthy country to middle-class parents, with my every need attended to by society. Had I been born somewhere else, I certainly would not be successful as I am now. Instead of being a physicist, maybe I would be boxing cheap plastic gadgets in a factory in Asia. I was born into the top rung on the current global economic arrangement, instead of on the bottom.
To put it this way: if hard work led to wealth every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
In fact the top 10% keep the statu quo as it is because it benefits them. It benefits them that global economy is arranged in such a way that they are in the center, reaping the benefits of it, and keeping the "periphery" down and in their place, feeding them and their high standard of living. This means everything from stacking "democratic" governments with plutocratic cronies, to simply being a middle-class voter interested in maintaining things just as they are.
This. This is the root of the issue in its entirety. As a civilized species (civilized in the sense that we "have" civilization) we should ban as a practice and ostracize those that propone the privatization of capital gains and the socialization of capital losses. Period. The figure posted by parent speaks volumes of the flaws of the currently dominant economic paradigm.
I hate to get too tangential and throw shade in a generically, but I've always felt like those of us that aspire to be millionaires, etc., are doing it wrong.
(I don't have prime, I don't use prime, and I don't want this to be our future.)
Wish Amazon would offer an entirely "Made in first world with protected workers" store.
In many of these countries people voluntarily choose to work in these factories. They're terrible places to work, but apparently its still better than working in the fields.
A more effective strategy might be something like: https://www.ijm.org/who-we-are . They work within these countries to protect workers from the worst human rights abuses. (ie child sex trafficking and slavery)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances
That's a very narrow definition of "voluntary".
Show me people doing things they would do even if they weren't getting paid to do it. That's voluntary.
The presence of compensation does not preclude an action from being voluntary. Neither does the presence of universal biological imperatives like the need for food or shelter. These things are forced on us by nature, not other people, and are part of the basic human condition.
Providing necessary things for yourself is a voluntary action.
Interacting with others of your own free will to provide the things you need more easily than you could do on your own is also a voluntary action.
It only becomes involuntary when that interaction is forced on you, making you worse off than you would have been on your own (as always, from your own subjective point of view).
there are far worse jobs out there and no amount of automation will rid us of them. from friends that work as linemen; and they all seem to enjoy their jobs; to another who works as a vet; you want a job that not only soaks hours but heartbreak be a vet.
we have plenty of "not fun" jobs but that is exactly why we pay people to do them. there are those around you everyday, I love doing my lawn but have neighbors who don't want to.
modern economy hell, its gotten leagues better than it used to be. people don't realize how much better many jobs are because they believe the sensationalized stories of the day. I am not saying there is no room for improvement but just open your eyes to what was and realize how far we have come
> I've been calling amazon prime a "hiding of the poor" to my friends and family. (I don't have prime, I don't use prime, and I don't want this to be our future.)
Amen, parent and grand-parent posters.
Anecdotal, but I have visited a few of the Amazon warehouses in the Seattle area. I was surprised by the amount of effort Amazon went to to emphasize safety, work-life balance, healthy activities, and good work habits. There were free vending machines for PPE everywhere, and during the lunch hour each day, managers led workers in 20 minutes of organized exercise to keep people active and moving.
This is just one cluster of US-based warehouses, and probably doesn't account for the working conditions in all Amazon warehouses, but it was far from a sweatshop and workers seemed genuinely content with their jobs.
Employers are required by law to provide PPE for free.
My work is all the things I ought to be doing, but have to fit around the daily makework. Less of it gets done than I'd like.
I work a full week at one job + 2 nights per week. Feel that I do a lot of unpaid stuff (ie taking care of the household, cooking, ...) but still endlessly hear about how other people "don't have the time".
The useful non paid things that people actually do are greatly overestimated imo, because more often than not it will end up in the "don't have time for it" even though they could manage to find time for it if they really wanted to. Just a matter of priorities.
I'm far from perfect, and I don't do sports (which I also consider an useful non paid thing) for an example. Yet I wish I did, and I totally could if I had some discipline there. But it's not having more time, or less work, that would change it.
It's hard and everyone is lazy and tired, and there are so many easy ways out of the present moment, but the majority really doesn't push themselves much.
So since I moved out 22 years ago, my hypothesis has been that people who think housework is a full-time job are actually probably suffering from severe depression and/or anxiety.
Although most working parents report feeling rushed, the majority say that they spend the right amount of time with their children and that parenting responsibilities do not interfere with their career advancement. College-educated whites are, by some margin, the group most likely to report difficulties in balancing work and parental responsibilities.
We might feel like we're increasingly stretched by the demands of work and home, but that perception simply isn't supported by any data I've been able to find. I'm not saying that we've perfected work-life balance, but the overarching trend is substantially positive.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ320/orazem/addendum...
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
This was especially true in the Northern European countries where snow and lack of daylight would make it virtually impossible to work during the winter.
So both surveys include part time jobs, not sure how that contradicts the original point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-a...
I have coworkers doing 2 hours each way. A 4 hour commute each day would certainly eat into your time.
If you have a time machine with 20 laptops in the boot, that's enough to let you live like Biff in the almanac timeline. Does that mean anyone with a macbook is a millionaire in 1992 dollars?
This is not a solvable problem. It works ok for YoY inflation (that's the point) but, the phrase '2018 dollars' gets meaningless as we try to represent earlier years. Saying we are n% more wealthy than people in 1300, is just cheesy journalism mostly.
Anyway (long preamble, sorry)....
Just like trying to adjust inflation by 70 or 700 years is difficult, trying to account for hours worked and/leisure is difficult. Too much has changed.
Woman joined the workforce. Children left it. Work got homework added. Training became more of a leisure time activity. Commutes got longer. Lunches got longer. The first one is probably the biggest.
Btw there's an illustrative thread running through both... Childcare and elder care. These were done at home (mostly by women) as non economic activity. Now these are jobs. The generate GDP, work hours... But, children were being raised before. They are being raised now. It just didn't used to be counted as GDP/work hours.
I think one thing that people miss slightly is that some of this is our own fault. Everyone is heavy on the chase (me incl.) of things. We want full meals in a box at our door without the annoyance of doing any work for it. Some of our need for extra work and both adults working comes from our demand that we have a huge house and two new cars and two huge vacations and everyone has an iPhone X and on and on. You have to either work more or spend less and we've generally chosen work more. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that but we need to accept the consequences.
It is a waiting game. Waiting for more assignments. Waiting until 5PM. Waiting for my paycheck. Waiting to get fired. Waiting to retire. Waiting to die.
(n * (Commute. Sit. Wait. Commute. Eat. Sleep.)) Die. Where n == the days I have left in this world.
The things I work on feel like absurd, meaningless boondoggles with no head and no tail. So here I am spinning my wheels as I hurtle toward a grave.
That I know this is my reality forces me to deeply question the society I participate in. If I am so bound, restricted, constrained in my actions and daily routines, why not just cut to the chase as die already. The repetitive script for how my invarient pattern of living shall progress is obvious. Do I really need to live through it 10,000 more times?
The less meaningful work I get done during the day, the less energy I have after 5. Most days, I'll make quick dinner, turn on YouTube, watch videos for 10 minutes, and suddenly it's 11pm.
I guess there's an upside to being a long-time single with no attachments.
If your reality is so bad that you want to die, then how is taking action to potentially change things worse? A big part of this discussion is people want meaningful work and a meaningful life, but they want other people to give it to them. Why is that expected?
Unless, of course, you're saying we need to start a civil war to free all the office workers...
Not a fan of learned helplessness or woe is me. If you want to change, you can. It might not be easy but if you feel like waiting until you die, there's not much to lose, anyway.
What does saying "my life sucks" solve? The world isn't kind to most people, you have to make the most out of it.
The world isn't kind. But there's no reason we can't work to make it less so.
Even if you have to have an "interesting" job, most people aren't but a few years of schooling out. Hell, we're in tech where you're a few years of study and practice from being world class and/or making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, you've got to work at it, but that's really meaningful work.
[1]:https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs
If only that was as easy as saying it. People have responsibilites and stomachs that don't like (naturally) staying empty. Sometimes you just can't do it.
who said easy? change is difficult. life is hard and then you die, so you might as well go down fighting.
I wasn't as unhappy as you sound, I just didn't see the purpose of it (working) anymore.
And so I decided not to do it anymore. Instead, I've decided to buy a small amount of land, live sustainibly, start a market garden, and spend much more time with my family and integrate with nature more.
Life isn't bad, but it sounds like you're stuck in a rut. Perhaps you just need to find your passion, and make a plan to transition from where you are now, to where you want to be?
Started cheffing at 17, always wanted to code, self taught enough to be qualified as a chef and get a job programming for a fairly large company by 22.
It sucked. As you said, waiting for assignments, no decision making and just another cog in a very large wheel.
Went back to cheffing, I've now travelled all over Australia, lived in Japan for 6 years, met a woman who became my wife and is currently pregnant with our first.
I may work 70+ hours some weeks, but it's fun. I have ran 3 restaurant successfully as an executive chef, now I'm helping a family member with a take away and loving it(haute cuisine food from a take away? Can't plate as I useto but damn it tastes good at an affordable price).
Long story short I'm enjoying life now, seems you need to broaden your horizons work wise more than how life just is.
P.s when I get the urge, I still have a massive side project I work on, so that training in coding, definitely not wasted :-)
I hope you find a better fit for you mate.
High demand, high skill... why doesn't it pay better? The only answer is that there must be some other benefits to the field. They have to pay people better to work in an office because office work sucks a lot more.
The best I've gotten so far was 2k Au a week while running three restaurants as an exec.
Hospitality in general isn't the best industry for making money, although I am planning on my own place in a few years :-)
That aside, I think work has been debased because the values of currencies have been debased by central banks. The 1% fully and significantly invested in the stock market may be feeling somewhat differently, though.
Also, I think to some extent that the tech dreams promised by my childhood have largely been replaced by corporate simulacra that are in no way as satisfying.
The inertia of your current situation probably drains your energy and motivation to even experiment with making changes, but it is worth to find a trained professional that can help break that cycle. There's no shame in seeking therapy or support of some kind.
I suggest reading "Man's search for meaning".
This is a bleak message, yet it's true: most people do not like their jobs very much. They can just deal with it because they're not totally depressed. And the reason is, surprisingly often, simple brain chemistry. At least try some more roads before talking of suicide.
Very few people actively enjoy laboring for others. That's why they need to pay you to do it.
I enjoy building my own projects, but I have never found work stimulating unless I maneuvered myself into a position where I could learn something new. Unfortunately once you learn that new thing, and then refactor it as far as you can, you're back to boring uninspired work again.
Not to mention the parts of work which are actively terrible. Like hunting down a bug in a dependency.
Startups do what they do because they hope to find gold.
However, I think you're on to something here -- something like a reversed kickstarter; anyone could post something they would want to have and how much they would spend on it, more people could join the campaign and creators could get to work on solving it. Probably people already tried it, but off the top of my head I can think of about 10 reasons why it won't work...
Yes, that's exactly what needs to change.
>"Now, the workday is ripe for another disruption. Research suggests that in an eight-hour day, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes." https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... //
Other studies show the most productive workers take long breaks (~25% of working time).
Coding a quick Perl script to solve a real world problem on a factory floor and watching a dozen machinists start grinning and get way more productive is something I've been paid to do, and I never got unmotivated by. One of those jobs where you simply stay until the job is done, and don't feel put out in the least you got home at 11pm.
It's when you're slogging away 12 factors removed on some crap you know is utterly meaningless to anyone - even if it's in tooling you like - that's when I get severe motivational problems. I'd rather work as a cashier at a gas station where at least I can see the effect I have on society with my labor.
My point is, few people can walk up to a keyboard and program "productively" for three hours -- and then do the same thing the next day again indefinitely. Hidden in those productive hours is a lot of informal coordination, necessary for those three hours to be actually productive.
By no means is it given that 8 hours is the optimal workday, nor that the way we generally structure work is the most efficient, but luckily, our field is especially receptive to radical experiments, so someone will surely try this any day now. (/s)
Sort of. For the week, I would agree, for a lifetime, not so sure about that. I mean what happens when you are unable to work? That could come sooner or later, but when it does come, you will need a chunk of change to get you through the rest of your life. Also, at the other end of life, children can't work until 16, so someone needs a chunk of change to take care of them too.
I never became acclimated to owning a car, and every time I consider buying one, I just can't justify the value add. I don't even mean that financially it wouldn't net out (it certainly wouldn't), but the cognitive overhead of having to manage yet another thing doesn't really appeal to me. And then there's the thought of passively sitting in a box for about an hour a day in lieu of being out in the open air, which sounds awful.
I have a more aggressive timeline than most on the spread of automation (a catch-all for job replacement, obsolescence, changing labor market). I'm of the opinion there will be a significant shift on our lifetime with whatever social repercussions and accommodations follow. But I don't think people will ever stop "working."
I guess to some, the fact to be doing something is better than the job being interesting, a career, well paying .. (as long as it's not to extreme of course)
btw, I believe that we're wired to like work as a basis for social bonding (if you believe that social bonding was selected to help for survival, and work is basically mutualized survival). So doing something in group is probably always good as long as the group factor is good enough (aka not being slaves)
If people don't enjoy their work, their mission should be to keep looking until they find something that suits them. It's worth the effort finding something that you enjoy doing everyday.
Have you ever worked on a factory line for 40 hours a week on minimum wage, doing something only slightly too complicated for a machine?
My favorite gig was probably stocking groceries, as I enjoyed my coworkers and working at night.
Almost all of these jobs have been “truly boring”, but I’ve also been unemployed and completely without direction. That period of my life was very difficult, and I found that work, no matter how boring the job is, afforded me a dignity and purpose that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Of course, others may feel differently, and I understand that.
I think the biggest challenge to this utopia vision (assuming automation gets to this point) is more that, frankly, labor is not wealth. Land is land for instance regardless of what is automated or not. Rent seeking for various things is rather common, most of which automation will not touch. I can envision strong resistance to any sort of UBI scheme from this group (some of this group frankly seem to not even care for our current safety nets now).
Before we go through a true "post work" phase, we'll probably go through a phase where service oriented jobs are the norm -- this is also harder to automate away completely, although probably not near impossible like tackling assets and rent-seeking. The main problem here is that this side of the workforce is currently rather undervalued IMHO. So if one wants improvements in the world of work, I personally think putting more efforts here would be better vs. banking on UBI.
It's actually pretty good at it. The really fulfilling jobs like nursing or teaching go to those who are willing to sacrifice most other luxuries to do them; those who don't get a fulfilling job get more consumption to make up for it. Enjoyable work is a commodity like anything else.
It's significantly better at it than the alternatives.
Even UBI. Sure UBI sounds great in principle, you'll be given enough to live on and you can spend your time doing whatever takes your fancy, but in large-scale practice I don't see it working.
Making the majority of the population dependent on the government for their income is not something that has historically worked well.
Two, the idea is not that people will goof off all day. Some yeah. Most, no. Most people will find work they like doing and do it. What does go away, however, is the fear of failure, unemployment and poverty. So they will have much better options to search for their most effective niche, rather than leaping in panic upon the first offer.
Two, ideas and reality are very different things. The idea of communism is that everyone is provided for and people give what they can and only take what they need. Sounds great, very altruistic. In reality, it's been a nightmare everywhere it has ever been implemented at a societal level because the idea fails to take in to account human nature. UBI proponents overlook or understate this factor too.
…And it is by working that a man becomes more philos than other men to the immortals and to mortals. They all hate the idle.
— Hesiod, Works and Days, 600 BC
It's just that five days a week, I have to stop working and go to my job :)
I've yet to read any research without crippling flaws that suggests this kind of prediction isn't rooted in fantasy.
To take one example, look at https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut... section on call centers and imagine that Comcast applies ML to the next call you make with them. How well would that work?
My colleague felt alone, even though he lived with his girlfriend. I think our material abundance fosters isolation. There is no reason go to your neighbor and knock on their door. You live isolated in your home, you move anonymously through traffic, you work in a closed environment, you go home, and the cycle repeats. There is little room for accidentally making friends or even just having conversations.
And honestly, would xir be wrong? If we ever get to the point where robots can fully take over most human jobs even intellectual ones, we will have had to reach a level of artificial intelligence where even many not so radical religions and philosophies will wonder whether we are exploiting them.
When Tesla delved and Google span, who was then the gentleman?
The reason this matters is it's conceivable that an AI in a robotic frame could emulate practically all the behaviors we associate with a human (including behavior to display artifacts humans interpret as emotions, like smiling or crying). At that point, is such a thing a human? Or is it merely a fully-realized model of one? Does it make a difference?
This is the subject of tons of speculative science fiction. From a strictly computer science perspective, though, you can easily define a "square" class that fully implements all the behaviors of the geometric concept of a square. That doesn't make instances of it a square, though. They're merely digital models of squares. This is also the significance of the famous "There is no spoon" scene in The Matrix, when Neo has a realization that everything in the Matrix is a model which he can reach into and alter the properties of. Therefore, there's a strong argument to be made that from an objective perspective, even an AI that perfectly mimics human behavior is just a perfect model and not a human. However, humans being emotional creatures the objective argument will almost certainly not matter in that scenario.
This also has implications for the science fiction concept of "copied personalities", which Black Mirror loves playing with. If you make a digital copy of someone's mind, do they still have rights? I'd argue no for the above reasons, but again, there's an emotional angle which will usually override the scientific angle.
Of course if we weren't occupied by work all day then we'll find something else to compete in and "stress" ourselves about. And don't we already do this to some extent through innumerable athletic/mental feats like climbing mountains, and other ways that are essentially displays of wealth like a vacation in Haiti and so on. This is a simplification, one can successfully argue that many of these activities have "inherent" benefit besides signaling but that aspect is usually not spoken of at all so I emphasize it more here.
So the stressors of everyday life (whether they come from work or other means of competition) are an inescapable fact of human life. Too bad if you don't like it.
This article also correctly places the roots of the conception of work as the core of human identity as side effects of Europe’s Protestant movement. Amazingly, given that this is the Guardian, they failed to invoke the lazy trope of “colonialism” for the spread of this culture worldwide — for in this case it is accurate. The British empire, in particular, once it became run by the government, spread this model to the “lazy natives” as part of a cultural package. (It is no coincidence that the standard worldwide business attire — as with military uniforms — is based on 19th century British aristocratic fashion).
The final piece of course is the cultural reform required for UBI. Just as our conception of work is modern, our conception of money as a reserve of wealth is modern. Even back when Augustus personally paid off he national debt, the conceptions of money and power were backwards to where they are today (“Plutocrat” is another Industrial Age idea). Money was a way to show off your power, not a way to acquire it.
But money also serves a more much more important function as a signalling mechanism (a change in price indicates that there is more demand for T-shirts and less for TV sets) — one of the many fatal flaws in communism was a failure to understand this, and the current obsession with banking in the western economies demonstrates a related misunderstanding. When we have a robotic economy with a marginal cost of production close to zero, why should “wealth” reflect a bank balance? What would be the point of accumulating one?
What will you spend your UBI on if the goods and services are not being produced, because no one is being paid to do them?
None of these are a necessary consequence of people receiving an unconditional amount of money regularly. People can still may want to work for luxuries, or I might want to pay others to sway their personal projects in the direction I prefer.
Plus, maybe some services may be "essential" only under the current working scene, but might become less so if everybody adjusted their way of life to a slower rate of consumerism (buying more virtual goods rather than physical, traveling less, working from home, buying local, etc). A lower income level could be sustainable under those conditions, if some percentage of it is guaranteed.
The belief is that this category of goods and services would be rare - that most things are not so inconvenient or tedious to produce, that most demand could be covered without making people put themselves out a lot. Of course it's possible this is wrong.
Or the unicorns? I mean, as long as we are just handwaving this stuff.
Society cannot be ruled in a top-down manner, period.
All the same, let's not forget there are huge numbers of people in terrible situations they did not bring upon themselves. These are the people worth helping, even if it means a bunch of selfish, badly behaved people get helped along with them. At some point, mitigating the consequences of people (predictably) behaving badly has to be looked at as basic damage control.
You are correct that I do not need a car, but you are wrong to assume it is trivial to lose 2+ hours of free time each day as just another luxury.
Frankly, your position on needs vs wants seems like a convenient excuse to look down on other people who have different concepts of value.
There is very little, in the western world, that we NEED to survive. You do not need electricity, for example, but no reasonable person would call it a luxury -- point being it is more subjective than you imply. Would also help your argument if you realize your perspective is extremely privileged.
Some people have kids who did not want them, and yes it was a mistake but not as much a decision as something that happened -- they may not have the monetary, intellectual or moral foundation to handle an unwanted pregnancy. So this woman, maybe a single mother, now has a child and is struggling to pay her bills, a paycheck (or car repair, or medical expense) from being evicted.
Your speech would not be relevant to a person in such a situation and there are many many many such people.
People who eat out 5-10 times a week don't get to complain about being broke, but how is that a new insight? To me it trivializes the real struggles of the working poor.
The problem preventing a jobless society is the reverse: what happens to you if your personal projects are not valued by society enough to pay you for them, and therefore you can't sustain yourself from them?
Someone without the skills to create marketable projects can decide to work towards projects created by others, and be compensated for it; that's what a "job" is.
For a jobless society, you should be able to pursue your own projects without starving in case that they do not sell. These projects may involve pursuing leisure, starting charitable deeds, or taking care of your family, all without the direct beneficiaries paying for it. For this to happen, we should:
1) find a way to provide a basic livelihood for everyone in that situation (Basic Income is the most talked about); and
2) value people pursuing their own projects, more than we value people being the most productive* they can possibly be.
*(where "productive" is defined as "building stuff that people will pay for". This is the most common understanding of productivity, but I find it somewhat circular).
In essence, in order to exist, a jobless society should value you being happy more than it values you accelerating the velocity of commercial capital. This doesn't require radically new economic theories; but it requires an adjustment of the parameters by which we measure "efficiency" in what we consider an "efficient economy".
"No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements."[0]
If a society is jobless thanks to automation, I see this as the inevitable fate.
And as for a society that values my happiness; I don't see being happy as a worthwhile goal for an individual to aim for. To be happy and content for a long period of time is, in my eyes, akin to being dead in the water.
[0]: In "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell (I think it's chapter 12?)
Instead,a world where you "work" in anything you really like (without having to worry about getting paid or not), where everything is virtually "free" and achievable, as long as you mantain an active "working" status. Think of it as a 1 - working, 0 - not working. If you are in 1 status, you can acquire anything you need (and even want) in modic proportions.
More to elaborate later on.
The obsolescence of humans in the workforce means that we are gradually being stripped of the power to put a roof over our heads and bread in our plates while capital becomes independent.
At this point, feeding non-productive humans still benefit the economy (by preventing riots and allowing the productive individuals to contribute), but if the vast majority of humanity does not participate in the economy anymore, I don't see why the market would keep on feeding it. And at that point we would be so dependent on automation that we'd all starve to death.
Our economy is a dissipative structure, not unlike fire, nuclear chain reactions and living organisms. It consumes energy (dissipates it, actually, increasing total entropy) in order to perpetuate itself.
Its real currency isn't money, but energy. Money and finance are tools to set its goals and direct its actions.
Fundamentally, supply is energy/matter/recipes to transform either.
Demand stems from survival instinct and reflexes. Humans demand material security, the market provides it in exchange for labor. The economy demands to be kept running through our work and keeps us mostly safe in exchange.
Those instincts/reflexes were acquired by anything alive thanks to evolution.
Currently, companies are subject to heavy selection pressure. They've been morphing at an impressive pace thanks to technological progress, becoming ever more efficient thanks to automation. Only the most efficient stay afloat. At some point, feeding humans will not be the most efficient way to keep themselves up and running, and when that occurs, we will be too dependent to survivie without them.
The primary and secondary sectors are becoming autonomous fast (autonomous tractors, trucks and mining equipment), and so is the industry. The tertiary sector is only useful as long as humans themselves are useful to the first two sectors.
I'd all for a universal paycheck, if it weren't for that nagging suspicion that it won't work out like in Star Trek. That the powers that be will decide something altogether unpleasant for the non-working majority.
He said that some "known" Silicon Valley folks have expressed that the recent opioid epidemic is a positive because these addicts aren't needed will fall out of the workforce, thereby making the transition to the "world without jobs" easier.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-intervie...
This Time It's Different, honest.
Now the claim seems to be that it will work if only the people own the automated factories. That's close enough to the same claim for "this time it's different" to be a valid description of the claim.
> Are you really saying things stay the same despite the HUGE, game-changing advances of technology?
Agriculture was a huge, game-changing advance of technology. So was industrialization. We've seen them before. So claiming that this huge advance will make work obsolete requires a bit more than "but look, there's a huge advance!"
> It's like you just dismiss all the information and discussion...
I've seen lots of discussion, but not much information. Rhetoric, but not information.
I mean, yes, factories are becoming more automated. That's true. It's not leading to a world where nobody needs to work, though. (Current US unemployment is below 4%. That's not looking like evidence for a world where nobody needs to work.)
What does this even mean? It's a very specific metric, not sure it is backing up your argument in the way you think. There are a lot of discouraged or under employed workers who would disagree that things are not changing in a fundamental way.
Unless there is some new slave class that's going to do our work for us, your can't have productive society without someone working.
There are simply too many humans and not enough resources for everyone to homestead or farm, and even then, people have to work for themselves, and it would end up in more work.
Re: your second point, homesteading or farming on the individual level makes no sense, that is why farming is specialized and scaled up. Why would this no longer bte the case?