It’s subjective and there’s a pithy response to any argument. But for me it’s night and day.
I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs.
This is hours a week of freed time.
Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.
That's you moving up the class-ladder, not the results of automation. As you said, humans are the cornerstone of that resource chain you're describing, for most part.
It is just fundamentally strange that you are including gig economy work in a discussion of automation. That isn't automation! The people shopping for you are not automatons just because your interaction with them is mediated by an app! They are doing your chores for you and have less time with their families so you can have more time with yours.
It’s heavily automated where I shop. I know because I write software for the robots at some of these customers and 3PLs. I watch the robots do their thing on a big board.
Right, the human+machine system is providing the scalable and convenient service, but the "human" part is usually some minimum-wage or gig worker. This kind of automation is helping the haves, but not so much the have-nots.
I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.
>But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.
The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.
India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.
True story from the early oughts: a friend spent some weeks at the India office of his big US-based software company.
When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!
I said for the majority if people. Tech people like us, with nice salaries, are able to enjoy these things more than those who have to do the grunt work.
No matter how good automation gets, the government is going to lag way behind. I don’t foresee a transition to any sort of utopian era where everyone enjoys the fruits of automation. I think those at the top will continue to hoard the wealth because they own those systems.
Given that the majority (as in around 90%) of people are no longer agricultural serfs or slaves toiling in the fields, I'd say that automation has definitely led to better lives.
IIRC, the breakdown was typically around 1% lords and priests, 9+% soldiers to protect the lords and priests against other lords and priests, and 90% unfree agricultural labor of one form or another (being a serf was slightly better than being a slave, but only a bit).
How exactly is "automation and robotics" taking the burden from our shoulders? I live in a single family house. I still need to hire plumbers, electricians, handy men to paint my house, etc. I still need to hover over a porcelain bowl a few times a day and clog it up a few times a year. Toilet augers and plungers to the rescue.
There was a time when if you wanted to know a phone number you had to manually consult a huge book, if you wanted to share a photo with family you had to manually carry the print to them, if you wanted to watch a movie at home you had to drive to blockbuster, and if you wanted to hurl abuse at a politician you had to wait for them to hold a rally in your city and queue for hours to get a front row seat.
Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.
Online phone books are not as complete. People lose their digital photos. Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now. Politicians don't read pleb Twitter accounts.
You lost me at "Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now". While "better" is debatable, my watch list of films I want to watch on Netflix will most likely outlive me
Obviously the 90s movie rental place had no movies made after the 90s.
A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.
This really sounds like great progress. If a clogged up toilet is considered something of a big problem to highlight, we've come a long way.
Farming is highly automated both in terms of pre-made bulk chemicals and machines on the fields.
We mass-produce cars. Indeed, we have cars that we can leave months on end without maintenance. And they run both faster and further than a horse.
We have automated labs that can produce and test medicine in high pace.
We have seriously large industries (gaming, cruising, performing arts) that do nothing but give people something to do now that we don't have to worry about having enough food by end of winter.
In historical context, this is all thanks to industrialisation and the specialisation of industry.
The effects of the change of agriculture should not be understated. The industrialization of agriculte has made it possible for the majority of the population to do something else then farming. (be it substance or tenant farming).
Having an abundance of food and not relying on substance farming for the majority of your needs also has the knock-on effect of kids not being needed on a farm, but getting education instead. Which in term will eventually lead to more industrialisation etc.
I didn't interpret the parent comment's reference to "automation and robotics" to include "industrialization and specialization". Sounds like a bunch of brogrammers coding up useless growth tech, funded by clueless VC funds. FTX and Upstart comes to mind.
Industrialization and specialization has been the direction of society since agriculture, if not earlier. Automation and robotics is supposed to be the stage that came with industrialization, then digitalization. Those brogrammers coding up useless growth tech are just a big soap bubble in a much larger stream of the direction of society.
You are mistaking a (large, obnoxious, all-encompassing) trend of the economic moment (albeit a moment that has existed for 1.5 to 2 decades now) for the greater direction of civilization. A mistake in scale.
Porcelain bowl technology has improved greatly in the last couple of decades. Updating that might save you the effort with the auger and plunger, and make the regular use a little more pleasant as well.
Exactly; maybe we can take from this that there is (some) truth in that "nobody wants to work", so we should do something about it with automation, but we also need redistribution so that we don't end up in a society where nobody has any money except a few trillionaires.
Or maybe, just maybe, people could find a way to break themself off a slice of that wealth by doing or creating something of value and nudging themselves along the number line between $0 and $1T. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.
Breaking off a slice of that wealth, which by your own admission, is limited. And so what happens to people who can't?
The additional problem to this framing is that anywhere between $0-[amount dictated to provide a stable life, including inflation] is a hellscape and has proven extremely difficult for majority of people to escape from for a variety of reasons.
But sure, the solution is everyone being their own boss hashtag entrepreneur... but wait if everyone is their own boss... who do the bosses exploit so they can nudge themselves further down the number line faster than others?
>Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
-- some idiot 50 years ago. Glad things have changed!
The issue is not people working or not working; The issue is the distribution of power. If it's not a problem of the people in power, then it won't get solved, easy as that. This is not something that can be solved on the individual level, because due to the population numbers, we now exist in a huge, global, interconnected system of societies, governments, and such. And these issues, at the end of the day, could be solved by evolving, changing that system. And the individuals follow, as their incentives dictate.
Rather than seizing money and capital why not just make the automation affordable for everyone? That's what's worked in the past with washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, electric ovens, furnaces, cars, power tools, etc. All of those are labour saving devices that have replaced backbreaking physical work that everyone used to have to do on a daily basis. Instead of seizing the means of production you should be designing and selling the means of production to the largest possible audience. With cheap computation and electronics it's now possible to set up a small partially automated factory at home. Wasn't that literally the dream of past communists? The workers having ownership of the means of production and reaping all the rewards of their labour?
The problem is we taught AI to make art before we taught it to make useful work. so when it finally catches up and we all have free time, but are we supposed to do? Just yell prompts into SD-9000?
As it happens, gave a 5-min lightning talk on text-to-img yesterday, and from discussions with colleagues afterwards one thing that works well is 'Mr Blobby' in various situations.
The idea that people would be free to make art when automation obsoleted menial labor was because art was viewed as something inherently pleasurable to do, not because it is needed. You could yell prompts into SD-9000 if you want, or you can paint it yourself, you can even choose to do nothing at all. It doesn't matter which, as long as you are pleased with the result.
I think its a bit like starting a hobby programming project. If you google your idea, you're most likely going to see that someone else already did it and all the fun will be sucked out of what you're doing. Better to just not look and do it for your own enjoyment. If you want to make art, make it, don't look at what stable diffusion or others are doing.
So long as there remain any scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) improvements in automation and robotics will only be put to use to help us outcompete our peers.
It's more galling when you realize these shortages, at least of housing, are artificially created in order to make sure people keep working as much as possible.
The connection between "I want my home price to go up" and "I want other people to have to work really really hard for me to sell them my home" should be less tenuous.
> If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time.
How will you pay for the ever-increasing rent on apartments when you're 70 and beyond?
Owning a house is short-term pain but allows you to lock in a "rent" (mortgage) which will never increase and will at one point go to zero, hopefully before you retire.
> Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.
This makes sense though -- I think it's somewhat natural for people to want growth/progress. I've found that working towards goals is one of the things that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled in life.
i personally don’t know anyone who _wants_ to work. people work because fulfillment of basic needs has been tied to making oneself “useful” in a capitalist society. given a choice the vast majority of humans wouldn’t work a day in their lives.
I love working and do it even if my needs would otherwise be met by public subsidies (I am disabled, obviously and legally).
It helps that I'm paid for work that I'd otherwise been doing, but I have a decent history of working less great jobs because I find the prospect of overcoming challenges, that I'd not put upon myself, satisfying.
I wonder what the breakdown is between people who, if all their needs were satisfied at some agreed-upon level, would choose to engage in activities that produce something or who wouldn't.
And of the ones who wouldn't, what would their reasons be? For some, I can imagine a great taste for art and travel and appreciation, which isn't "productive" per se, but is self-motivational. For others, perhaps trauma of various kinds makes the prospect of producing anything and subjecting it to scrutiny overwhelming.
I'm sure there are some people who truly are just plain lazy, but I think if people truly don't want to do anything, there's usually a reason, and if that reason were overcome, most people, just because they're humans, would want to do something.
Most people would want to do something but not necessarily something useful. Just think about what hobbies people have, and ask yourself what percentage of those are as economically valuable as what those same people do in their day jobs. I'd suggest there are almost no cases like that, otherwise those people would quit their jobs and spend all that time on their hobbies instead. (And indeed, some have.)
Sure, but you have to realize there's a trade off there. If you reduce the incentive to work in order to enable more social interaction and leisure, that's going to come at the expense of productivity, resulting in a diminished economic "standard of living" across the board. It also puts you at a competitive disadvantage with other societies which don't implement those reduced incentives.
Now maybe that price is indeed worth it, but I think that's a decision that should be left up to each individual, not imposed at the societal level via UBI or something similar. If any particular person decides it's worth taking the economic hit in order to work less, or on something that's less economically valuable, that's completely up to them.
Yeah, that's what in was trying to get at by just saying "something." I was thinking of any activity where, at the end, something exists that didn't before. I think there's probably a giant swath of people who would want to make things for the enjoyment they get from making them.
I have to disagree about hobbies, though. I think a lot of people intentionally choose not to monetize their hobbies, lest the pressure of making money infect the joy of the hobby itself.
> I wonder what the breakdown is between people who, if all their needs were satisfied at some agreed-upon level, would choose to engage in activities that produce something or who wouldn't.
I really wonder too. I like UBI for example for this reason. I'd think addictions would wreak havoc among these people too though, because addictive things wait around every corner of society, promising to make the bad feelings go away. Nevertheless I think it would be a worthy effort to have a system that doesn't let people stoop down below a specific level.
That’s only because we have limited the scope and definition of “work” to just mean doing a job or task to earn money doing tasks for someone else’s interests. Most people probably hate the concept of a job, but I think human beings have an innate desire to be useful to their community (I.e. the fundamental definition of “work”)
Hello! I love to work. I'm not a fan of business, capitalism, corporate life, or anything like that, but I love work.
I'm almost 50, and have been working full-time since I was 17. Yes, full-time, even during my five years as an undergraduate. Even when I hated the work itself, I have always made the best of it. I worked in over 30 restaurants around the US for about 10 years, and had a great time of it, even though the work was horrible, grueling, and often with people I could not stand.
Now I work in software development, and love my job. It's stressful as heck, often frustrating, but rewarding in many ways.
Check out Karma Yoga - it's close to how I've always felt about work. Incidentally, I have no personal connection to Hinduism:
I'm sure if we dig deep enough, we can probably find clay tablets impressed with gripes about lazy workers and insolent children. Socrates famously groused about "kids these days".
> Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs.
What if the "kids these days" is not constant, but periodical? People say "kids these days" when kids get lazier, and don't say nothing, when parents get stricter.
I wonder if the famous survivorship bias plays a role here? The people writing this are those whose writings survived generations so they may have been good and motivated and could complain about the young ones, but eh slackers who may see the young ones as more motivated maybe never wrote anything to influence the society's opinions.
I'm sure everyone felt like they were overworked by their parents when they were younger and parents can readily identify chores that they were responsible for as kids which are not omitted from their children's current regime.
Just had the same thought! Parents and kids is an asymmetric relationship. Parents have experience and practical control, kids have more energy and burn warmer. When there's real shit to do, everyone listens up. When everything's easy, the opposite.
For at least the past 500 years in the Western world, each successive generation of kids has surpassed their parents in wealth, education, and standard of living. Why is "kids these days" still a thing?
That's the reason - each generation has it easier than the previous and doesn't need to work as hard. So the older generation sees the younger generation not working as hard as they did and complain.
I know that there's a passage in the "Hagakure", which was written from 1710-1716, where the author complains about how the youth is degenerating, not working like they should and not interested in the old values anymore.
So, no clay tablets from me, but that as a datapoint on how long the youth is terrible.
In the case of Athens, it was only 61 years between Socrates being accused of "corrupting the youth" and Athens being conquered by the much more rural and conservative (small c) Macedonians.
Pretty uncharacteristic quote for him considering how he pretty much died for the kids! There was one group of people Socrates surely had a problem with, and it was not "insolent children." No offense, but it would be people like you he would hate these days, those that appeal to ambiguous authority and precedence to argue that static values override actual interrogation in the present.
For sure. At the same time, reading Socrates, he comes across as a pompous know-it-all, the sort you wouldn't want to spend an evening with. When adolescents take on that hectoring attitude, it's kinda cute and adorable, look at Young Jimmy there, such an idealistic kid, and going to college! On an adult man it's just exhausting. Anyway, but yeah, very principled man, until death, commendable really.
He only comes across that way because he really did know it all relative to his peers. The things he talks about may be obvious now exactly because of him, but weren't in his day.
I think the error with using these quotes as a sort of rebuttal to the sentiment is that it’s totally possible for the quotes to be accurate, relative to other recent times in those areas. A local decline in physical productivity versus, say, 50 years ago. And the productivity 50 years ago might’ve been lower than 50 years prior to that. Especially in particular fields that might’ve once pulled in a high percentage of ambitious people, but don’t anymore, for whatever reason. And many believe that successful societies generally become more decadent.
"decadent" is a pejorative word for "growing respect for the rights and dignity of workers."
What does it say about us that we look back 150 years and say that it's unacceptable that children were engaged in dangerous work and that people worked pretty much as long as there was daylight six days a week, but we look back 30 years and say that people back then had a strong work ethic because they worked unpaid overtime?
Are you sure that’s what people mean when they say “decadent”? I would, for example, include things like hedonism, living beyond one’s means, decreases in frugality, increases in conspicuous consumption, decrease in self-reliance skills. That’s not to blame the people involved, they’re responses to the environment that people find themselves in, and the culture that has developed.
That quote is clearly not from Socrates, or even claimed to have been from Socrates by any ancient author, as the source you link to notes.
However, it does show up frequently, and my view of it has generally been that it could have originated as a loose translation of the Superior/Right Argument character from Aristophanes' Clouds, who does make similar claims:
>And so, young man, that’s why you should choose me, the Better Argument. Be resolute. You’ll find out how to hate the market place, to shun the public baths, to feel ashamed of shameful things, to fire up your heart when someone mocks you, to give up your chair when older men come near, not to insult your parents, nor act in any other way which brings disgrace or which could mutilate your image as an honourable man.
This is very problematic in that, first, Clouds is a comedy mocking Socrates, second, Socrates' views at that point in the play are supposed to be represented by the Inferior/Wrong Argument character, not the Superior Argument character, and third, Aristophanes is mocking the claims of both characters.
In a fashion typical of Aristophanes, the Inferior Argument wins the debate with a joke about the audience's sexual proclivities that convinces the Superior Argument that its cause is hopeless.
There was the recent article posted on hacker news that had a tablet from Egypt recording people's excuses why they didn't come to work. It was very relatable,some things they were sick, but there were other reasons too that looked like weak excuses. It was no different than showing up at your factory job and explaining why you weren't there to be on the sofa line yesterday.
Yes, but people learn the wrong lesson from this; it's not an indication that these complaints are therefore futile or useless. It's evidence that gripes of this kind are deeply functional and ineradicable. They're "lindy," as the kids say.
I'm sure that with the right search engine one could find a century worth of mentions for absolutely any common phrase, for example "people are working harder and harder", "children don't like to work anymore", "there are not enough jobs", etc.etc.
Such memes only prove the people spreading them don't understand selection bias and cherry picking. "Nobody learns statistics anymore."
This is missing the point of the meme. The point is that the phrase “nobody wants to work” is a meaningless constant refrain that goes back decades. It’s not new, and it’s not true.
> The point is that the phrase “nobody wants to work” is a meaningless constant refrain that goes back decades
And you are missing the point of my rebuttal: that by the same method anything can be made to appear like a constant meaningless refrain, regardless of actually being one.
It should be clear to anyone with even lacklustre intelligence that finding recurring instances of the phrase "there are not enough jobs" throughout history does not rule out that there were times when that concern was indeed warranted.
True story, as an american, most people I grew up with are not working corporate jobs. Of my cousins, probably 60% are willfully unemployed and refuse to work for anyone. They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products. Anything to not have to work. The crazy thing is they are generally very happy and have had not trouble dating. Its the people day in and out in their 150k-300k a year corporate job that seem the most miserable to me.
For reference I'm white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.
Can't deny that while I work full-time, I certainly produce the vast majority of the value I produce in a fraction of that time. 5-15 hours seems about right; if anything, closer to 5 than 15.
Day trading, a big one is advertising agencies. Basically call every doctors office etc and offer to run FB ads for them for 1k-2k a month pay + ad costs. Then find a few other clients and just relax.
Day traders work way longer hours than that, the clue is in the name. I think your friends are you just BS'ing you about where their income comes from. The amount of "day traders" who are just wealthy gambling addicts who in reality lose money long term is too damn high.
But people who could make 250$ per hour don't want to work lol. Scalability of work on output is definitely not linear. If I had to work 10 hours a week on anything I want I would definitely perform much better in 4 weeks than a person working 40 hours a week for someone else can perform.
Exactly. I can make hundreds per hour flipping heavy machinery. I can't make a day job out of it because the local market doesn't have enough volume to support that unless I incur a bunch of cost that reduces my hourly profit in an attempt to scale to a point where I can reach a broader market (i.e. start a real used machinery selling business).
The idea of making half that with those kind of hours seems insane to me. I know these people exist, but have no idea how. If anyone has any specific examples of what they're doing, I'd greatly appreciate it
I made decent money swing trading stocks with python for a while. I became a better programmer, but it was soulless and lonely so I went for a job at a startup where I get the same freedom plus get to be with people who are more/less experienced.
There is more to a job than just money. The lonely financial gig is not for everyone
I know people like that. Typically they make passive income from their assets (stocks and real estate). But they don't want to admit it, so they make up fake jobs like "day trading and selling online products".
Keep an eye out on these people. Lots of things were possible in a 0% interest rate environment that aren't now. This could be brilliant people working an incredible job they don't need to work full time on, or they may be the individual version of a corporation surviving only because the interest rate environment is 0%.
They don't even have to be directly taking out loans to do it themselves, only taking advantage of economic conditions created by cheap money.
"Stocks" haven't been a great source of passive income this year, and "real estate" is showing signs of having just passed its peak. These easy jobs may not survive these things contracting.
Of course, if they're walking off with cash rather than debt, they may still be among the winners of the whole 0% interest regime.
I haven't worked for the corporate world since 2004. When I got back from a trip to Europe I realized I was working myself into the ground and decided to take the hit and start my own business. Now I set my own hours. I think that the time off from work during the pandemic is making others reconsider working for someone else. I laughed out loud when I read some corporate slave droning on about people don't want to work. Stop treating people like cogs in a wheel and create something that society values thats ethical. And maybe, just maybe, you will retain people who actually care about what you do.
Well, it worked out for you, but starting your own business is usually exactly the wrong move for someone who doesn't want to work themself into the ground.
I guess it would depend on the venture. Do something you love to do, and you never work a day in your life.
It takes time and dedication, but I didn't work myself into the ground doing it. But I did have part time jobs when I was starting out.
I think its something you create for yourself that grows over time, when you work at a job, you are enriching someone else's vision. That's ok if your visions are aligned, but if you are working at a job that doesn't align with your value system, there is only so much of that you can take.
This can certainly be true, but the catch is when you say I love to do x so I will start a business to do x, it's not so simple. You now have to do x + sales + customer service + management, etc. And while it is possible that you love to do all of those things, in the great majority of cases, you don't, and it will be a grind. That's not to say it's not worth it, though.
You wont know until you try. I found that doing something you love, you will try anything to make it happen. It starts out small and its not like it requires one to be solid in every area of the business right away like the areas you mentioned. Some times people want to compete against well established markets and that is a recepie for disaster. But again, it depends on the niche you have decided on. Also it takes time and people cut you slack if you are delivering value to them that's authentic. I found this source great for starting new business: https://fronterablog.com/
That's actually orthogonal to my point. Plenty of people have "lifestyle businesses", but if they generate true value, it's not a mystery as to where the money is coming from. Consult for 20 hours a week, just as an example, and I'm not even slightly mystified at how you can live on that income. I'm not advocating a suit-and-tie, 40hour/week desk job as the only alternative. Were I single I'd probably work half-time myself.
I'm talking more about the Amazon drop-shipping businesses where "you can earn $5K/week!!1!" where if it's really that easy the market should already have been consumed, or even the ones you just plain can't figure out where the money is coming from. There's a lot of "businesses" that work in a 0% interest environment that won't work in a 5+% environment. If you've been doing it since 2004, you are almost certainly not in such a space because you started in a non-0% interest environment.
I mean, basically, it's just like how the crypto business space is completely collapsing now. They are the first big things to topple over in a non-0%-environment. Smaller analogs to that can happen too, it just won't make the news that Joe-down-the-street's business of importing bulk cheap IP-pirated stuff from China and distributing it to local parents who want cheap Disney-branded stuff went out of business because it turns out that even though he didn't take loans himself, every other company involved in his business was offering subsidized, not-truly-sustainable prices because of the cheap money environment. (If you don't know, that's a real thing, not an outrageous fake example I'm making up. I have a particular acquaintance in mind who did that as a side hustle for a while.)
It's been that way for most of history. Most great artists, philosophers, scientists, and politicians were either born into wealth or had wealthy patrons they met by networking with the wealthy at e.g. country clubs, concert halls, or elite universities.
In Western culture, and probably others, your job is closely tied to your identity. Even if you don't feel so yourself, it greatly affects how others perceive you. After all, when you meet a new person, one of the first things you ask them is, "What do you do [for a living]?" If you're living off passive income, answering that question can be complicated. So you just make up something like "being a consultant" or "doing online sales."
It's pretty similar with generational wealth. I know someone who has been working doing script reviews in Hollywood for 10 years now. It's definitely paid work, but maybe a few thousand a month; the rest of their lifestyle is financed by their parents, who run a real estate business. But it's a lot easier, socially, to say "I'm a script writer and reviewer" than to say "I don't work, my parents pay for everything."
Who are they fooling? No one buys that you can have a brand new Mercedes and live in a high rise apartment by "reviewing a few scripts" every few months.
Sure, but he has a Civic from the mid-2000s and lives in a typically-priced LA low-rise rental apartment in an okay-but-not-amazing neighborhood. Funnily enough, he's dating a girl in a very similar situation who currently has an occupation of "pet sitter."
If you actually sat down and did the math, it'd be obvious. But most people don't think that hard about it, and will accept an answer of "I'm a script writer" in the context of e.g. telling a Tinder date what you do for a living.
This is making a likely wrong assumption and then philosophizing about how our society is bad and this false assumption proves it.
I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job.
> I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job.
The key difference is that if you offered any of those people a $100k/year office job they would take it in a heartbeat. The kind of people we're talking about can support their upper-middle class lifestyles without a fulltime job because of passive income or generational wealth.
Nah they have almost no savings for retirement/in general. They may inherit their parents home, but thats a long ways off. But when you hang with them, you realize that when working full time you are missing out on psychological states and experiences that are taken from you by having a full time job.
> But when you hang with them, you realize that when working full time you are missing out on psychological states and experiences that are taken from you by having a full time job.
In my experience, the "experiences" that single, underemployed people of working age (20s to 40s) have are largely watching shitloads of Netflix and YouTube.
After all, even if they aren't working a fulltime job, most of their friends are. And even if they find friends who are also underemployed, finances will be tight for both of them, so what exactly can they do together? Usually just hang out at each others' places and watch Netflix and YouTube.
Admittedly this could look a lot different for those with kids, though.
My kids graduated and I moved to SW CO. I have a lot of friends in their early 20s and look at them with the perspective of someone with children that age.
I know a whole lot of ski bums, dirt bag climbers, rafting guides, semi-pro slack liners or whatever. Sound healers and yogis.
To be clear, I'm sure there are plenty of folks watching shitloads of video, but I don't know them because of selection bias. And I know that some of them are trustifarians and others are sociopathic scammers.
Personally, I like my remote coding job. I'm also underemployed but the job is easy and has gentle requirements on me. So I'm a bit removed from what these folks are doing.
However, the folks I know are generally having a much better time than just sitting around watching netflix, and the comment about having experiences taken from us by having full time jobs is a real thing from my position:
being able to just go on a 3 month climbing spree sounds really fun and I know folks doing that, I just don't want to have to re-acquire a job in the aftermath.
Pure cope. They’re out socializing, making friends and memories, developing their personalities and finding their future life partner, while we’re cooped up inside leaving comments on an orange tech forum in between meetings.
For the trust fund kids masquerading as "influencers" and "journalists" who have a circle of other trust fund kid friends, yeah, sure, their lives are especially Insta-worthy.
Much less so for the underemployed 30 year old making $5k/month off passive income, or a mom&dad stipend, who still has to occasionally look at their bank account.
Pretty common for people in these situations to fall into depression and/or alcoholism.
i know people who do this. But, ironically, they work way harder than i do at my corporate job and my job is pretty demanding. Also, they don't have any kind of health isn nor retirement plan or anything else except cash to pay bills and whatever is left over.
Yeah this is accurate of their situations. Very little savings, no retirement. But I will say, alot of them are early 30s now and have fulfilling lives and good relationships/friendships. They have developed themselves along avenues that are hard to do when working full time. Really makes me wonder
Given what I've seen based on how subreddits like r/purplepilldebate talk about desirability of a random Google researcher making 300K a year, the average FAANG engineer should take their current total comp and divide it by 5 to understand how they will be treated by women.
Women in the dating market know "the odds are good" (that he is a good provider) and that the "goods are odd" (this guy interacted with 5% of the women that his peers did in university)
The phenomenon of the lonely cringy dating posts on blind will only get worse.
It will work out just fine, the only thing that matters when you date is your physical appearance and social skills. Money has no bearing at all, you know how many women broke dudes in bands pull?
Then the Covid abusive and indiscriminate restrictions happened.
The freelancers and small businesses owners and workers were forced to shut down and isolate while the managerial class could remote work on their laptops near the pool side or in their chalet.
Who was the most targeted and impacted? Who benefited the most? Who enacted, supported and profited from the measures?
> Of my cousins, probably 60% are willfully unemployed and refuse to work for anyone. They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products. Anything to not have to work.
They don't have to work conventionally, with a micro-managing boss from hell, with a rigid 9-to-5 ass in seat mentality, no way of ever getting that wage raise carrot their upper management holds in front of them for years, dystopian corporate bullshit (anything from spyware on the computer to waiting days for a simple IT ticket to be resolved) and most importantly: large parts of the profit they generate never ever ending up in their own pockets.
Instead, they work on their own risk, have a way better ratio of "amount of money per profit generated" and have a way better quality of life.
The huge disincentive to work is the amount of tax you have to pay. In my country, if you are successful, you can easily get to a point to pay over 50% tax on what you make, which effectively means you work most of the year for the tax man and not yourself.
It may sound selfish, but if you look at the poor quality of public services and if you need to see a doctor you still have to go private, because NHS is crap, you'll feel miserable.
People simply don't want to be cheated by the state, so they rather choose odd cash in hand jobs.
> which effectively means you work most of the year for the tax man and not yourself
That would be true, if we lived in a world where your gross salary corresponded linearly to the amount of work you did. In that world, the hardest-working CEO would make 3x (maybe in some extreme cases 5x) what the laziest server made. But instead we live in a world where the "successful" make 100x-1000x, because that money isn't coming from their effort, it's coming from a combination of government subsidies (you may not be using the NHS, but the poor people who make your job possible certaintly are) and extreme power imbalances in market conditions that allow them to pay the people on the ground creating the value very little.
Worker is contracted to work 9 to 5. Regardless if they WFH and put their feet up for the entire year doing nothing, or they work their bottom off, the majority of time they are required to commit is paid to the tax man.
> Lately the government seems to be wanting to take more from me to give to those types
Relevant to the article, this particular rhetoric too has been a consistent and regular complaint in the conservative discourse over the years.
While it's true that some forms of social safety net assistance like medical care are definitely getting more expensive (because the care itself is getting more expensive as we discover new tests and new treatments, of course), most of the stuff you're complaining about has been getting significantly stingier over the decades.
Is there a particular benefit program that is upsetting you? Are you absolutely sure it's getting more generous?
Are those going to people who "don't want to work", though? That was your original frame: assistance for unemployed/underemployed, not just assistance for people other than you.
Most statistics I've seen show that student debt holders are employed at a greater rate than the general population (not surprising, they have bills to pay). And of course pandemic relief was quite famously disproportionately aimed at employERs. All those PPP loans did nothing for the unemployed, as they only went to firms with existing payrolls.
I really think if you look at this in a more detached way, you'd maybe find that the "government helps people don't want to work" frame of these arguments is misplaced (which is the point of the linked article).
Or, it's investing money in people with high expected ROI, such as, able-bodied adults. For it is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them, right? (paraphrasing Tiberius)
Why? So you don't feel like a rube for working? Why don't you stop working, if that's the case, and cash in on this sweet sweet deal you allege these "healthy able-bodied adults" get?
I would try carrying that though to its logical conclusion. Healthy people who don't want to work (aka don't have value, as work == value) shouldn't be given money. Money is needed to survive. Therefore it is okay if the person does not survive? Or rephrased as, if you don't work, you should not live?
I hope that's not really how you feel, but it seems like the clear logical conclusion to that kind of thinking.
Society requires people to contribute. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and we do not have robot slaves that do everything for us as we laze around.
If you want to survive, you need to contribute. Wanting to play video games all day while other people work to fulfill your lazy desires is what a child thinks.
I find college debt forgiveness to be backfilling an unequal burden we put on college students starting about a dozen years ago. During the great recession, many states needed to crank up tuition to cover gaps in their university budgets. Students at the time were given two options: pay even more out the nose for reduced services or drop out. Those who chose to stay had to build up even more debt than they would have piled up in the aughts. We as a country shifted the societal costs of educating our populace further onto the backs of the young. I often compare the state my friends who went to state school are still paying off their debt with the experience my older family had. My parents were both able to graduate from a state school with less than 5 figures of debt. My grandmother was able to pay her way through Berkeley with no debt by working at See's. Sometime around the late 90s we started to break this contact and by the teens, we had completely pulled the rug out from incoming college students. Despite having no college debt myself, I see college-debt forgiveness as a step back towards the society we used to be.
You say "seems", but a lot of people invest a lot of time and money in controlling the appearance of welfare for the undeserving; what is the reality? If you check the numbers and historical trends, is welfare for the non-working healthy people actually up or down?
That's a republican-non-zero-sum take on things. It's also trivially easy for people to find local examples to point at (often in the same family tree)...but the reality is: Society costs money, money you don't directly get to direct...could go to roads, or police, schooling, food for the poor, satellites, military, unemployment, retirement.
it's EASY to say 'I don't want my money goin' to those slackers' when your money is going to a whole lot of additional societal benefit...and it even benefits you.
At the same time, fewer labor hours are needed for society to function. MORE AND MORE PEOPLE will be working less and less over time.
It really isn't. My understanding is spending a dollar on certain things actually increases the total amount of money available to society later on, which is how investment works. Giving poor people 1$ is equivalent to giving society 1.7$ because poor people have immediate expenses to spend that money on, like debt.
One of the most disillusioning moments in my life was the bailout during the financial crisis. Bush ( republican ) wrote the check and Obama ( democrat ) handed it over. It was that moment when I finally accepted who was really in charge.
Corporate welfare is wildly unpopular across the entire political spectrum just like going 10/10ths on enforcing federal weed laws is. It's very much a textbook case of people not representative of "the people" having the ear of policymakers.
I'm not sure why anyone bothers with Snopes these days. They've become just as lazy as many of the sites they supposedly critique. This article (listicle really since they're just aggregating these other sources and putting a stamp on it) "confirms"
> a brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages.
by providing references to quotes from a pastor, a home owner, a few small business owners, a former labourer, and farmers. If these are the evil capitalists that socialists are railing against then I think they'll have a hard time recruiting.
Well, in this particular case, they seem to have expended a lot of effort to painstakingly search newspaper archive to support a meme posted by... "the Great Socialist Cat Memes Facebook page". I'm not sure they're necessarily lazy, they're just suspiciously specific about where they're willing to put in any effort.
People does not want to work >>for your company<< because they can have better opportunities than what >>your company<< offers. That's free market capitalism which companies are fighting for.
Exactly what is going on really. Employers unable to envision that maybe it might not be worth it to work for your company are getting punished as information flows faster. The youth is not lazy, just has better information.
Teaching relies heavily on "just do this extra bit you don't really have to... it's for the kids, after all". Stay a little longer, get this extra thing done, just buy that thing yourself, come in a little early to help with this other thing. You're sick but this kid emailed to say they didn't understand the lesson the sub taught... and you could help, so you do. Implicitly, when not explicitly. It gets a lot more obvious that's what's going on after you leave education and see what a normal job is like. Which might be less insulting if the pay were competitive, but it's not that hard for a competent teacher to leave for another sector and see a 20-50% TC increase. You lose the Summers but everything else is better.
Yes, I know lots of people who want to work. They derive satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from it. That they get paid isn't the primary thing for them -- that's just a necessity of life.
But they wouldn't feel that way working just anywhere. They have found a great match with an employer who treats them well.
Many do, and employers promptly abuse it. Many who have been lauded in the covid times as heroes, the people who really keep society together, are criminally undervalued in compensation and other benefits. Aside from these, there are field where the love for the field is looked upon as a compensation in itself, and therefore it pays less and abuse more, for example computer game developers.
Although, I don't think work is the default for humans. Evolutionally speaking I'd think taking care of the self, the partner, and the immediate next of kin would come first, and would take most of the day. In this light, a 9-5 is really unnatural, because you give "your best" to a completely different context. I see the point in it personally, but I also understand why it could feel unnatural and undesirable.
Hmm, I used to think that. But then I took a year off. I probably could have coasted about 5 years, more if I invested it in a particular way. But at the end of it I would have had nothing. So I went back and got a job. It seemed more interesting than doom scrolling reddit and youtube. It just seemed kind of wasteful to me to do basically nothing. As I realized my hobbies I did not really care about either.
Things can be both enjoyable and necessary[0]. I could imagine that early humans may have enjoyed the "work" of hunting (given that some modern people still seem to), even though it was also necessary for feeding themselves.
[0]: Money being a stand-in for "necessities" here.
I like my job and I do enjoy having SOME obligation to do SOMETHING. But if money wasnt factor in my decision making I'd probably work 3 days a week and spend more time on hobbies or volunteering. Having no work at all makes me a bit listless.
The people saying Nobody Wants to Work Anymore are the ones who truly don't want to work - they just want to tell other people [what|how|when|where] to work.
There's also those who don't want to work by telling others they can generate currency/value using computers to generate some semi-random numbers and writing it down, declaring the random number has value.
One of the fallacies I find most annoying is "people said this thing in the past, too" with the implication being that it wasn't true then, isn't true now, and can probably never be true. None of those things follow.
To be clear, I think the statement "nobody wants to work anymore" is incorrect. But that's irrelevant, I'm talking about the quality of the argument.
When you summarize the argument as just the "past", you're rounding off the actual error. Most often when people say "nobody wants to work anymore" they're not talking about the entire historical past. They're business owners or parents or investors talking about their personal experience, compared to just a few years or decades ago. In that case, 150 years of people saying this every decade does show that these people are simply out of touch, yelling at clouds. Unless someone wants to argue that every few years there's a complete reversal of sentiment.
Generation 0: each child kills 0 people on average.
Generation 1: each child kills 1 people on average. G0 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 2: each child kills 2 people on average. G1 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3: each child kills 3 people on average. G2 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3 points out that "lol people have been saying that forever. Nothing is happening. Our generation aren't that bad, because previous generations had the same narrative."
I'm catching a whiff of straw...
There's a fundamental distinction between a relative statement eg "People are working less than they were before" and an absolute statement eg "Nobody wants to work anymore". What you've demonstrated falls into the former.
Relationships in time work transitively -- if each successive generation is worse, they're by definition worse than any have been before. See: Peter Gibbons and how his life is the worst its ever been, each new day.
> The piece began, "According to a new survey released by TinyPulse, 1 in 5 executive leaders agree with this statement: 'No one wants to work.' These same leaders cite a 'lack of response to job postings' and 'poor quality candidates' when describing why it’s hard to hire right now."
Alternative interpretation: 20% of executives are bad at hiring. Like this very much seems like a case of blaming the general public for their failings.
In the Netherlands part time contracts are the norm.
Most people are able to have a decent lifestyle with a 30-36 hour work week.
Then you hear stories about Japan or Korea and I think to myself "those countries aren't even richer than we are what the HELL are they doing all day at the office?!".
Aside from the truth or falsity of the claim, which is amply discussed in this thread:
Snopes is, supposedly, a neutral Mythbusters site for the Web.
"Urban street gangs initiate members by making them drive at night with lights off and kill anyone who flashes lights at them" -- busted!. Great stuff.
> But we were unable to find a documented Biden visit to the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency. We reached out to the White House to learn more and will update this post if we get more information.
> We should note, however, that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Texas border in June 2021 and toured immigration facilities. In December 2019, before the presidential elections, Jill Biden also visited asylum seekers in camps on the Mexican side of the border.
How is relevant that Harris went to El Paso? The press secretary said Biden went there. We "reached out to the White House to learn more" -- what more is there to learn? They already busted it.
.. and investigate, scrupulously, anything favorable to their side:
The problem isn't that people don't want to work. That's perfectly normal and expected. The problem is that we give them so much free stuff (paid for by the people who do work, of course) that they don't have to work.
It's very ironic that the meme 'meme' mutated itself to become something much less sophisticated (an image with a caption shared on the Internet) than its original (and true) meaning. Just another proof that meme natural selection favours the less sophisticated ones. But it's 2022 and we all know that.
Truth to be told, the same happens in gene natural selection. All animals are insects, other than a rounding error.
- advertising say you can make millions just doing some comfy fun things like having sex on cam (OnlyFan and co), or publishing some casual videos about nail arts etc;
- other advertising say you can just make money, not that much but still more than many classic jobs just running a bit on a bike (Just Eat, Uber Eat, Foodora, Glovo etc the "raider platform");
- in the past IF you worked hard you got something in return, nowadays on one side many advertising tell "in 2030 you'll own nothing and being happy", the reality again tell that working poor do exists, that even if you work hard inflation makes money value less faster than the income growth etc.
Well this is not new, and its in most cases its usually said by very UN-intelligent, or otherwise dubious individuals, often with a socialist slant, blaming capitalism for being incorrect which is immaterial to the issue because at its core this is an XY communication problem based on a false narrative.
If you want to get people to work, you have to compensate them appropriately, and not what you think is appropriate, but what they think is appropriate.
If you have a system that degrades wages (via currency regularly), and its increasing in velocity and you don't meet that, of course you will lose people because its more economic for them to grow their own food or do some other more productive effort.
What's sad is, there are many books that are well respected, that cover exactly what has and is happening, and they are willfully being ignored by the people that could make a change but don't.
Labor relations is not new subject material, anything that interferes increases costs, and if its not worth their time to do the work in the first place, workers won't do it because they have options and there are fundamental limits to how far wages can fall below their real productive value.
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1778) is just one such example, and the Wealth & Poverty of Nations by Landis, is another.
The majority of people these days are either adding to the noise, not addressing the problem, or are actively making it worse because they personally benefit from doing so at everyone elses expense.
Actually going out and doing something, is in the minority, because that's how most people alive today were raised, ideologically through the public school system.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadNow that it's happening (and has been for a couple decades) we only hear FUD from folks trying to get everybody back to work.
I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs.
This is hours a week of freed time.
Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.
But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.
I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.
The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.
India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.
When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!
No matter how good automation gets, the government is going to lag way behind. I don’t foresee a transition to any sort of utopian era where everyone enjoys the fruits of automation. I think those at the top will continue to hoard the wealth because they own those systems.
IIRC, the breakdown was typically around 1% lords and priests, 9+% soldiers to protect the lords and priests against other lords and priests, and 90% unfree agricultural labor of one form or another (being a serf was slightly better than being a slave, but only a bit).
A UBI for instance could help with that. But there's nothing but FUD on that subject.
Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.
A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.
Farming is highly automated both in terms of pre-made bulk chemicals and machines on the fields.
We mass-produce cars. Indeed, we have cars that we can leave months on end without maintenance. And they run both faster and further than a horse.
We have automated labs that can produce and test medicine in high pace.
We have seriously large industries (gaming, cruising, performing arts) that do nothing but give people something to do now that we don't have to worry about having enough food by end of winter.
Having an abundance of food and not relying on substance farming for the majority of your needs also has the knock-on effect of kids not being needed on a farm, but getting education instead. Which in term will eventually lead to more industrialisation etc.
...but what does Upstart do? https://youtu.be/WWxl4W_eVUA?t=110
You are mistaking a (large, obnoxious, all-encompassing) trend of the economic moment (albeit a moment that has existed for 1.5 to 2 decades now) for the greater direction of civilization. A mistake in scale.
But < 2% of Americans anyway work in agriculture. Down from 98% a century or two ago.
And US population grew by what, 50% in 30 years? But jobs by 25%. Manufacturing jobs dropped steadily as a pct of population. Because, automation?
It's often repeated that automation just allows people to get better jobs running the robots. Trouble is, 2 people run a robot that replaced 200.
Just ask Detroit how much automation benefitted jobs.
The additional problem to this framing is that anywhere between $0-[amount dictated to provide a stable life, including inflation] is a hellscape and has proven extremely difficult for majority of people to escape from for a variety of reasons.
But sure, the solution is everyone being their own boss hashtag entrepreneur... but wait if everyone is their own boss... who do the bosses exploit so they can nudge themselves further down the number line faster than others?
-- some idiot 50 years ago. Glad things have changed!
Becoming a billionaire is definitely from hard work and not at all luck and being born with the tight parents!
The issue is not people working or not working; The issue is the distribution of power. If it's not a problem of the people in power, then it won't get solved, easy as that. This is not something that can be solved on the individual level, because due to the population numbers, we now exist in a huge, global, interconnected system of societies, governments, and such. And these issues, at the end of the day, could be solved by evolving, changing that system. And the individuals follow, as their incentives dictate.
Hmm, not on-topic for OP, but oh well.
And those workers would get more money. And have more stuff, better medical care, more experiences.
And then someone would say “thats unfair they have more money than me”.
Rinse and repeat.
It's more galling when you realize these shortages, at least of housing, are artificially created in order to make sure people keep working as much as possible.
Mostly just homeowners voting in their self interest, and unintended consequences.
Even with rent increases, I can live in 500 sqft apartments and basically retire in my 30s/40s.
If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time.
The price of single-family detached homes is so out of line that it is absurd.
How will you pay for the ever-increasing rent on apartments when you're 70 and beyond?
Owning a house is short-term pain but allows you to lock in a "rent" (mortgage) which will never increase and will at one point go to zero, hopefully before you retire.
Today's luxuries becomes tomorrow's bare necessities.
Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.
This makes sense though -- I think it's somewhat natural for people to want growth/progress. I've found that working towards goals is one of the things that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled in life.
Not only do we always want more, we also want more than other people.
It helps that I'm paid for work that I'd otherwise been doing, but I have a decent history of working less great jobs because I find the prospect of overcoming challenges, that I'd not put upon myself, satisfying.
Nature is a harsh mistress and we've abstracted a lot, but not all, of that away.
And of the ones who wouldn't, what would their reasons be? For some, I can imagine a great taste for art and travel and appreciation, which isn't "productive" per se, but is self-motivational. For others, perhaps trauma of various kinds makes the prospect of producing anything and subjecting it to scrutiny overwhelming.
I'm sure there are some people who truly are just plain lazy, but I think if people truly don't want to do anything, there's usually a reason, and if that reason were overcome, most people, just because they're humans, would want to do something.
Not everything is about abstrac economic value. Humans have other needs which need to be met, like social interaction and leisure.
Now maybe that price is indeed worth it, but I think that's a decision that should be left up to each individual, not imposed at the societal level via UBI or something similar. If any particular person decides it's worth taking the economic hit in order to work less, or on something that's less economically valuable, that's completely up to them.
I have to disagree about hobbies, though. I think a lot of people intentionally choose not to monetize their hobbies, lest the pressure of making money infect the joy of the hobby itself.
I really wonder too. I like UBI for example for this reason. I'd think addictions would wreak havoc among these people too though, because addictive things wait around every corner of society, promising to make the bad feelings go away. Nevertheless I think it would be a worthy effort to have a system that doesn't let people stoop down below a specific level.
Don't think it's a capitalist thing.
I'm almost 50, and have been working full-time since I was 17. Yes, full-time, even during my five years as an undergraduate. Even when I hated the work itself, I have always made the best of it. I worked in over 30 restaurants around the US for about 10 years, and had a great time of it, even though the work was horrible, grueling, and often with people I could not stand.
Now I work in software development, and love my job. It's stressful as heck, often frustrating, but rewarding in many ways.
Check out Karma Yoga - it's close to how I've always felt about work. Incidentally, I have no personal connection to Hinduism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_yoga
> Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs.
- Socrates, ~400 BCE [1]
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1
[2] previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426
God knows most jobs out there are hardly of earth shattering importance.
By Zeus! Kids these days...
So, no clay tablets from me, but that as a datapoint on how long the youth is terrible.
The Papacy.
The Roman Catholic Church had quite significant swings in power over time.
I counter your Protestant Reformantion point with the Catholicization of Latin America.
Total membership is up, total wealth is up, actual power isn’t.
It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907."
From your link.
What does it say about us that we look back 150 years and say that it's unacceptable that children were engaged in dangerous work and that people worked pretty much as long as there was daylight six days a week, but we look back 30 years and say that people back then had a strong work ethic because they worked unpaid overtime?
However, it does show up frequently, and my view of it has generally been that it could have originated as a loose translation of the Superior/Right Argument character from Aristophanes' Clouds, who does make similar claims:
>And so, young man, that’s why you should choose me, the Better Argument. Be resolute. You’ll find out how to hate the market place, to shun the public baths, to feel ashamed of shameful things, to fire up your heart when someone mocks you, to give up your chair when older men come near, not to insult your parents, nor act in any other way which brings disgrace or which could mutilate your image as an honourable man.
This is very problematic in that, first, Clouds is a comedy mocking Socrates, second, Socrates' views at that point in the play are supposed to be represented by the Inferior/Wrong Argument character, not the Superior Argument character, and third, Aristophanes is mocking the claims of both characters.
In a fashion typical of Aristophanes, the Inferior Argument wins the debate with a joke about the audience's sexual proclivities that convinces the Superior Argument that its cause is hopeless.
Results date from yesterday to 10 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426116):
> Because it seems that once you declared basic income and nobody wants to work anymore
Such memes only prove the people spreading them don't understand selection bias and cherry picking. "Nobody learns statistics anymore."
And you are missing the point of my rebuttal: that by the same method anything can be made to appear like a constant meaningless refrain, regardless of actually being one.
It should be clear to anyone with even lacklustre intelligence that finding recurring instances of the phrase "there are not enough jobs" throughout history does not rule out that there were times when that concern was indeed warranted.
For reference I'm white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.
...Is this not working?
Is that gross, or after paying income and Social Security & Medicare tax, like wage earners do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE
There is more to a job than just money. The lonely financial gig is not for everyone
It’s a great way to lose money while you think you’re working though.
They don't even have to be directly taking out loans to do it themselves, only taking advantage of economic conditions created by cheap money.
"Stocks" haven't been a great source of passive income this year, and "real estate" is showing signs of having just passed its peak. These easy jobs may not survive these things contracting.
Of course, if they're walking off with cash rather than debt, they may still be among the winners of the whole 0% interest regime.
It takes time and dedication, but I didn't work myself into the ground doing it. But I did have part time jobs when I was starting out.
I think its something you create for yourself that grows over time, when you work at a job, you are enriching someone else's vision. That's ok if your visions are aligned, but if you are working at a job that doesn't align with your value system, there is only so much of that you can take.
I'm talking more about the Amazon drop-shipping businesses where "you can earn $5K/week!!1!" where if it's really that easy the market should already have been consumed, or even the ones you just plain can't figure out where the money is coming from. There's a lot of "businesses" that work in a 0% interest environment that won't work in a 5+% environment. If you've been doing it since 2004, you are almost certainly not in such a space because you started in a non-0% interest environment.
I mean, basically, it's just like how the crypto business space is completely collapsing now. They are the first big things to topple over in a non-0%-environment. Smaller analogs to that can happen too, it just won't make the news that Joe-down-the-street's business of importing bulk cheap IP-pirated stuff from China and distributing it to local parents who want cheap Disney-branded stuff went out of business because it turns out that even though he didn't take loans himself, every other company involved in his business was offering subsidized, not-truly-sustainable prices because of the cheap money environment. (If you don't know, that's a real thing, not an outrageous fake example I'm making up. I have a particular acquaintance in mind who did that as a side hustle for a while.)
In Western culture, and probably others, your job is closely tied to your identity. Even if you don't feel so yourself, it greatly affects how others perceive you. After all, when you meet a new person, one of the first things you ask them is, "What do you do [for a living]?" If you're living off passive income, answering that question can be complicated. So you just make up something like "being a consultant" or "doing online sales."
It's pretty similar with generational wealth. I know someone who has been working doing script reviews in Hollywood for 10 years now. It's definitely paid work, but maybe a few thousand a month; the rest of their lifestyle is financed by their parents, who run a real estate business. But it's a lot easier, socially, to say "I'm a script writer and reviewer" than to say "I don't work, my parents pay for everything."
If you actually sat down and did the math, it'd be obvious. But most people don't think that hard about it, and will accept an answer of "I'm a script writer" in the context of e.g. telling a Tinder date what you do for a living.
I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job.
The key difference is that if you offered any of those people a $100k/year office job they would take it in a heartbeat. The kind of people we're talking about can support their upper-middle class lifestyles without a fulltime job because of passive income or generational wealth.
Not in my part of the US. I've rarely been asked, and have never asked unless it was pertinent to an ongoing discussion.
In my experience, the "experiences" that single, underemployed people of working age (20s to 40s) have are largely watching shitloads of Netflix and YouTube.
After all, even if they aren't working a fulltime job, most of their friends are. And even if they find friends who are also underemployed, finances will be tight for both of them, so what exactly can they do together? Usually just hang out at each others' places and watch Netflix and YouTube.
Admittedly this could look a lot different for those with kids, though.
My kids graduated and I moved to SW CO. I have a lot of friends in their early 20s and look at them with the perspective of someone with children that age.
I know a whole lot of ski bums, dirt bag climbers, rafting guides, semi-pro slack liners or whatever. Sound healers and yogis.
To be clear, I'm sure there are plenty of folks watching shitloads of video, but I don't know them because of selection bias. And I know that some of them are trustifarians and others are sociopathic scammers.
Personally, I like my remote coding job. I'm also underemployed but the job is easy and has gentle requirements on me. So I'm a bit removed from what these folks are doing.
However, the folks I know are generally having a much better time than just sitting around watching netflix, and the comment about having experiences taken from us by having full time jobs is a real thing from my position:
being able to just go on a 3 month climbing spree sounds really fun and I know folks doing that, I just don't want to have to re-acquire a job in the aftermath.
Much less so for the underemployed 30 year old making $5k/month off passive income, or a mom&dad stipend, who still has to occasionally look at their bank account.
Pretty common for people in these situations to fall into depression and/or alcoholism.
That's the part I find most fascinating. I just can't fathom how that will work out down the road.
Women in the dating market know "the odds are good" (that he is a good provider) and that the "goods are odd" (this guy interacted with 5% of the women that his peers did in university)
The phenomenon of the lonely cringy dating posts on blind will only get worse.
The freelancers and small businesses owners and workers were forced to shut down and isolate while the managerial class could remote work on their laptops near the pool side or in their chalet.
Who was the most targeted and impacted? Who benefited the most? Who enacted, supported and profited from the measures?
Really makes you think.
They don't have to work conventionally, with a micro-managing boss from hell, with a rigid 9-to-5 ass in seat mentality, no way of ever getting that wage raise carrot their upper management holds in front of them for years, dystopian corporate bullshit (anything from spyware on the computer to waiting days for a simple IT ticket to be resolved) and most importantly: large parts of the profit they generate never ever ending up in their own pockets.
Instead, they work on their own risk, have a way better ratio of "amount of money per profit generated" and have a way better quality of life.
That would be true, if we lived in a world where your gross salary corresponded linearly to the amount of work you did. In that world, the hardest-working CEO would make 3x (maybe in some extreme cases 5x) what the laziest server made. But instead we live in a world where the "successful" make 100x-1000x, because that money isn't coming from their effort, it's coming from a combination of government subsidies (you may not be using the NHS, but the poor people who make your job possible certaintly are) and extreme power imbalances in market conditions that allow them to pay the people on the ground creating the value very little.
Worker is contracted to work 9 to 5. Regardless if they WFH and put their feet up for the entire year doing nothing, or they work their bottom off, the majority of time they are required to commit is paid to the tax man.
That sounds like working to me.
Relevant to the article, this particular rhetoric too has been a consistent and regular complaint in the conservative discourse over the years.
While it's true that some forms of social safety net assistance like medical care are definitely getting more expensive (because the care itself is getting more expensive as we discover new tests and new treatments, of course), most of the stuff you're complaining about has been getting significantly stingier over the decades.
Is there a particular benefit program that is upsetting you? Are you absolutely sure it's getting more generous?
Most statistics I've seen show that student debt holders are employed at a greater rate than the general population (not surprising, they have bills to pay). And of course pandemic relief was quite famously disproportionately aimed at employERs. All those PPP loans did nothing for the unemployed, as they only went to firms with existing payrolls.
I really think if you look at this in a more detached way, you'd maybe find that the "government helps people don't want to work" frame of these arguments is misplaced (which is the point of the linked article).
Btw, not that it matters, but I'm against student loan forgiveness.
Why? So you don't feel like a rube for working? Why don't you stop working, if that's the case, and cash in on this sweet sweet deal you allege these "healthy able-bodied adults" get?
I hope that's not really how you feel, but it seems like the clear logical conclusion to that kind of thinking.
If you want to survive, you need to contribute. Wanting to play video games all day while other people work to fulfill your lazy desires is what a child thinks.
...you say, while posting on HN.
it's EASY to say 'I don't want my money goin' to those slackers' when your money is going to a whole lot of additional societal benefit...and it even benefits you.
At the same time, fewer labor hours are needed for society to function. MORE AND MORE PEOPLE will be working less and less over time.
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/column-the-amount-o...
Corporate welfare is wildly unpopular across the entire political spectrum just like going 10/10ths on enforcing federal weed laws is. It's very much a textbook case of people not representative of "the people" having the ear of policymakers.
> a brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages.
by providing references to quotes from a pastor, a home owner, a few small business owners, a former labourer, and farmers. If these are the evil capitalists that socialists are railing against then I think they'll have a hard time recruiting.
They used to be sort of a fun Mythbusters for the Web. Now they're just a site trolling for clicks from left-wing users.
Well, in this particular case, they seem to have expended a lot of effort to painstakingly search newspaper archive to support a meme posted by... "the Great Socialist Cat Memes Facebook page". I'm not sure they're necessarily lazy, they're just suspiciously specific about where they're willing to put in any effort.
Just look at nurses. They are chronically underpaid, yet still do their jobs.
But they wouldn't feel that way working just anywhere. They have found a great match with an employer who treats them well.
Although, I don't think work is the default for humans. Evolutionally speaking I'd think taking care of the self, the partner, and the immediate next of kin would come first, and would take most of the day. In this light, a 9-5 is really unnatural, because you give "your best" to a completely different context. I see the point in it personally, but I also understand why it could feel unnatural and undesirable.
I've learned that this sentiment is somewhat uncommon, though.
Things can be both enjoyable and necessary[0]. I could imagine that early humans may have enjoyed the "work" of hunting (given that some modern people still seem to), even though it was also necessary for feeding themselves.
[0]: Money being a stand-in for "necessities" here.
The people saying Nobody Wants to Work Anymore are the ones who truly don't want to work - they just want to tell other people [what|how|when|where] to work.
There's also those who don't want to work by telling others they can generate currency/value using computers to generate some semi-random numbers and writing it down, declaring the random number has value.
/s
To be clear, I think the statement "nobody wants to work anymore" is incorrect. But that's irrelevant, I'm talking about the quality of the argument.
Generation 1: each child kills 1 people on average. G0 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 2: each child kills 2 people on average. G1 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3: each child kills 3 people on average. G2 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3 points out that "lol people have been saying that forever. Nothing is happening. Our generation aren't that bad, because previous generations had the same narrative."
Please.
(Societies crash)
1000 years later:
"People have always been saying that!"
Alternative interpretation: 20% of executives are bad at hiring. Like this very much seems like a case of blaming the general public for their failings.
Then you hear stories about Japan or Korea and I think to myself "those countries aren't even richer than we are what the HELL are they doing all day at the office?!".
Snopes is, supposedly, a neutral Mythbusters site for the Web.
"Urban street gangs initiate members by making them drive at night with lights off and kill anyone who flashes lights at them" -- busted!. Great stuff.
Instead, they bend over backwards to cite irrelevancies about political figures they like: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-us-mexico-border...
> But we were unable to find a documented Biden visit to the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency. We reached out to the White House to learn more and will update this post if we get more information.
> We should note, however, that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Texas border in June 2021 and toured immigration facilities. In December 2019, before the presidential elections, Jill Biden also visited asylum seekers in camps on the Mexican side of the border.
How is relevant that Harris went to El Paso? The press secretary said Biden went there. We "reached out to the White House to learn more" -- what more is there to learn? They already busted it.
.. and investigate, scrupulously, anything favorable to their side:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walker-texas-resident/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-musk-could-threaten-fr...
It's fine for Snopes to be a "fact checker with an agenda." They just need to disclose the agenda.
Truth to be told, the same happens in gene natural selection. All animals are insects, other than a rounding error.
- advertising say you can make millions just doing some comfy fun things like having sex on cam (OnlyFan and co), or publishing some casual videos about nail arts etc;
- other advertising say you can just make money, not that much but still more than many classic jobs just running a bit on a bike (Just Eat, Uber Eat, Foodora, Glovo etc the "raider platform");
- in the past IF you worked hard you got something in return, nowadays on one side many advertising tell "in 2030 you'll own nothing and being happy", the reality again tell that working poor do exists, that even if you work hard inflation makes money value less faster than the income growth etc.
Long story short YES, it's true almost nobody want to work for starvation wages. The real meme should then be the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg
If you want to get people to work, you have to compensate them appropriately, and not what you think is appropriate, but what they think is appropriate.
If you have a system that degrades wages (via currency regularly), and its increasing in velocity and you don't meet that, of course you will lose people because its more economic for them to grow their own food or do some other more productive effort.
What's sad is, there are many books that are well respected, that cover exactly what has and is happening, and they are willfully being ignored by the people that could make a change but don't.
Labor relations is not new subject material, anything that interferes increases costs, and if its not worth their time to do the work in the first place, workers won't do it because they have options and there are fundamental limits to how far wages can fall below their real productive value.
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1778) is just one such example, and the Wealth & Poverty of Nations by Landis, is another.
The majority of people these days are either adding to the noise, not addressing the problem, or are actively making it worse because they personally benefit from doing so at everyone elses expense.
Actually going out and doing something, is in the minority, because that's how most people alive today were raised, ideologically through the public school system.