Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.
> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given
Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
For most of my life I thought no apostrophe was always wrong, since that's how you do both contractions and possessives in general with a name or noun. For some reason all throughout school people would say "it's" as a possessive was wrong without trying to explain "its" was a parallel to the separate words "his" and "hers", rather than "bradfitz's" or "that person's" like it looked like. Only someone in my 20s did I realize the connection and "its" stopped looking wrong.
I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride."
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?".
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals?
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege.
At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy.
We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.
> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff”
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
> “…bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.”
Which I believe lead directly to T in p45.
I have family in WI and it’s about jobs. What’s more, they’re tired of ‘costal elites’ and ‘we live in a global economy; nothing we can do about offshoring.’
This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.
In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs
We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
>Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.
There are plenty of people who do not accept this.
We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them.
The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
Woa. I'm with you all the way but let's agree that the people who think the disabled should be exterminated is a minority many of whom died at then end of world war II?
Even if I tolerated someone else exterminating people, hell even if I helped in some way I would still know that it is not morally defensible. Of course with 8B people you will find some willing to exterminate the disabled but not "lots" by any stretch.
I'm sure it is a small minority who think that way. It's impossible to tell for sure, but my gut tells me the number is still larger than we might want to believe.
I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%.
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.
Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them.
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.
As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone.
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] threadTypos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
But to me it’s about you trying to contribute.
I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money.
Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
Which I believe lead directly to T in p45.
I have family in WI and it’s about jobs. What’s more, they’re tired of ‘costal elites’ and ‘we live in a global economy; nothing we can do about offshoring.’
Most people make more than subsistence incomes; ergo, they are working for more than basic necessities.
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
There are plenty of people who do not accept this.
We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them.
The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.