You are taking the value of a tangible asset from 1969 and comparing it to todays value of said tangible asset. This in no way illustrates the inflation rate. All it shows (assuming your numbers are right) is the increase in the perceived value of gold in that time frame. The original comment's $650 number is close enough to be considered accurate
Little but that's sort of a distraction to the main point of the discussion. Using gold is no more helpful than say using the price of a barrel of crude oil then and now.
Interestingly, using crude oil gets you about the same results as gold. The figures above show a 34x nominal increase in the price of gold, while crude oil over the same period went up 32x.
Maybe poor choice in words, but the point is no one asset can be counted on to directly monitor inflation.
Using the gold example- suppose industrial demand for gold to fuel the semiconductor industry tripled the price of gold compared to 1969. Now suppose the price of milk, bread, gasoline, electricity, water, clothing, and alcohol only doubled in price compared to 1969. If inflation is a measure of your purchasing power IN GENERAL (not your purchasing power of gold), inflation was roughly 200%, no?
If gold had absolutely no practical value by itself, it would be free of market demands like that in my example. But of course then its value would have no connection to purchasing power, and we're right back where we started.
If you use Milton Friedman's (IMO, most-correct) definition of inflation as 'expansion of the currency supply' then Gold has actually tracked USD inflation extremely well, and the rate is far higher than the CPI.
In 1969 my father supported 2 kids and a wife that did not work, owned a house and ONE car on $100 a week. I think $100 a week in 1969 is roughly equal to $125k per year.
both are terrible measures, as a long-term measure gold isn't so bad, but for point-to-point comparisons (as is done in the parent post), gold goes through some crazy speculative bubbles. The CPI is dastardly manipulated figures. (hedonic adjustments, substitutions)
We all know that the Big Mac Index is the proper way to measure differences in money value. Assuming the Big Mac was still 45 cents in 1969 (as it was when it was introduced in 1967), and using The Economist's average US price of $4.56 for 2013, we get a roughly 10x increase, so it's worth about $1,000 today.
That's substantially different from the CPI-based value. I wasn't quite expecting that.
McDonalds claims that the Big Mac cost 49 cents at introduction. [1]
Also, imports have helped to keep inflation low. The Big Mac cannot be imported. Thus, you would expect it to show a higher rate of increase than overall prices.
> The CPI is dastardly manipulated figures. (hedonic adjustments, substitutions)
That's not manipulation. That's just trying to calculate an accurate number.
If you do no substitutions, then you will end up being a Collectible Goods Index, rather than a Consumer Goods Index. It makes no sense to calculate inflation in 2013 based on a basket of goods from 1919.
But that creates another problem. If you do no hedonic adjustments, then you will overstate inflation if consumers move upmarket. It's not the prices that went up -- it's consumer purchasing habits.
I'm not suggesting there is a good way to measure inflation. But there is no objective way to make these adjustments. To suggest that the official adjustments are better for some reason is just a stealthy appeal to authority.
$640 is correct. The price of gold (or artwork, or diamonds, or oil, or whatever other single item you may choose) is not an accurate proxy for the cost of living.
Stated differently: there is more to life than buying gold.
Nah, it's really worth $110,150, since you could have held on to the $100 for two years, then bought into Intel's IPO which would result in 5,000 shares held today due to subsequent splits, which are currently going for $22.03 each.
I first tried this exercise with oil instead of gold, but the price change over the period in question is nearly identical. I doubt it means anything, but I thought it was interesting.
Here is a crazy theory: Say you have a really big oil field. Really really big. Unimaginally huge wealth flows in every day because the world wants, nay needs this modern lifeblood.
How do you store that wealth. Do you stack IOU's from those countries in the form of currency? Nah. They will just inflate the currency to pay you back after they burn up all that precious oil? How about you just meter out enough oil to meet your life needs? Nah, they'll call your country a terrorist axis of evil and invade to help the oil flow.
ok how about this. How about you do a deal and pump as much oil as possible as long as you can exchange it for something real. and you have a long time cultural affilation for a yellow shiny metal. yeah that will do. How about we do a deal. We keep the oil pumping as long as we can exchange a ratio of oil barrels for this shiny metal. When the oil runs out in a hundred years or so we will have a stack of shiny metal to trade back.
The gold "price" prior to 1971 was a pegging set by central banks, only adjusted slightly every couple of years. A "free price-fluctuating world market for gold" as we today know it only exists since the 70s. (Some argue we're still under central bank-managed price pegging, just "smarter" but let's not go there...) Rendering your point pretty useless.
It's actually a lot more. 4.31% per year is likely what the US government reports. They traditionally under report inflation (although to a greater degree over the past 20 years). The bundle of goods used to measure inflation does not include housing and energy, which have been the primary sources of rising living costs (not to mention medicine, which I only just considered).
What is the point of tracking inflation if you're not going to account for what's actually reducing (or increasing) the purchasing power of your currency?
First, the CPI absolutely does include housing, energy, and medicine[1].
Second, it's incredibly hard to accurately measure such a nebulous concept as inflation (because there's no such thing as a "general price level"), but it's pretty bold to definitively state that the CPI understates inflation. Measuring inflation is hard. We can buy an iPhone 5 for half what we paid for the first one in 2007--how do we quantify that price change in the CPI? Does a 2013 vehicle that costs the same as its 1995 counterpart represent high or low inflation? It's not just prices that change--quality changes and spending behavior changes. And then we have to take the wildly changing behavior of 300 million consumers, buying god knows how many products, and consolidate that into a single number.
Then that single number has to stand up to those same 300 million people, each of whom is biased by 4 billion years of evolution to be loss averse, to notice bad changes and grow accustomed to good changes, and, inevitably, lots of them will point to things that are much more expensive, unconsciously blind to all the things that have gotten cheaper, and claim that the CPI understates inflation.
OK, I'll bite. Name 5 products or services that have significantly improved in quality at constant cost, or declined in USD price at constant quality, over the past 10 years (excl. high-volume offshored consumer electronics, which of course I'll grant you).
[I tried pretty hard myself and all I came up with was, possibly, clothing].
Cars. TCO has dropped a lot due to maintenance costs dropping. Mean household size has also declined steadily for 3 decades. We choose to have more space and nicer things rather than work less.
(I kind of took the 'ten years' thing and ran it back to when I was young, in the 80s and 90s, sorry. :-))
I don't think I ever have to change the oil in my car over the duration of my lease. Synthetic lubricants, tighter tolerances, and better seals are amazing.
Plus, at what other time could you get a 400+ hp car that can get 26+ mpg? The safety features are insane. The wipers and lights come on automatically and the car buzzes (or so I am told) if I drowse off behind the wheel. I can listen to punk rock in the middle of Wyoming, but I won't have to because my car will plot a route around it.
Clothing has gotten much better for less, but that's largely global supply chain. I checked into a hotel in China and my room had a pair of throwaway trainers for walking in the city.
I can safely fly between any points in Europe with the change left over from a beer.
I can walk into an optometrist and get a box of contact lenses for my astigmatic eyes and wear a clean, new pair every day, all for less than hard lenses cost decades ago and for which I would have to wait weeks with multiple fittings. And they still sucked, especially in a windstorm.
Bicycles that would be insanely futuristic when I was a kid, with disc brakes, aluminum frames, and more gears than I need, cost the same as my hunk-of-steel Schwinn.
The BLS says that prices have increased about 3% every year since 1993. Many people claim that this estimate is obviously too low. I'm claiming that it's reasonable. To test my claim, you suggest naming products or services that have increased in price by 0% or less, cumulatively, over the last 10 years. That's not a good test of my claim.
> 4.31% per year is likely what the US government reports. They traditionally under report inflation (although to a greater degree over the past 20 years).
Quite the opposite, in fact.
The US government has traditionally overreported inflation, because the CPI was not hedonically-adjusted until the year 2000.
The Billion Prices Project at MIT provides an independent measure of inflation, and it tracks the CPI quite well. (Note, though that Billion Prices uses a different basket that does not include services. Thus, it will not match exactly.)
Hence the somewhat curious (and I think, very American) idea of the "Golden Years". If you put your head down and work hard, taking no vacations, until you're age 65, then you flip 180 degrees in the other direction and retire into a life of full-time leisure. So if you live long enough, it really won't be a waste; you cash it in all at the end!
A Scandinavian psychologist somewhat recently proposed a typically Scandinavian reversal of this: he suggested people should work to age 80, but work proportionally less in all the years up to there. Basically redirect the pension system to subsidize more early-age vacation and less pension.
My grandmother basically did that, in rural Texas. She was a nurse, shifted to inspecting nursing homes for the state, and then to consulting for nursing homes, and worked at reduced hours up to six months before she died in her 80s. She had plenty of time for family, friends, and her church, and still got the satisfaction of putting her professional expertise to good use and getting paid. Seemed to work out pretty well for her.
Consulting was a critical step. This approach would be hard to pull off in most regular jobs.
I think this used to be much more common in the past. My grandfather, a farmer, also worked till about 6 months before passing, when his heart started weakening, at age 92. He would pull 12 hour days, and that's what kept him alive and happy. He would get depressed when he came to visit us in the city with nothing to do. Going from working 40 hours a week when you're 64 to idling all day as you turn 65 is just not healthy.
Working until 80 might sound reasonable to a software developer, but if you have a job like a construction worker or a firefighter, you may not be physically capable of doing your job at 80, even part time. So you'd have to switch careers to work into your 80s, which not everyone would be successful at pulling off.
I agree that's an open question. Whether a large proportion of people could work in some job up to age 80 (possibly after changing jobs) is definitely an important part of whether it would produce a plausible system.
It doesn't have to be the same job, or to be gap-free, though. If you have a strong retraining/welfare system to cover the gaps, as Denmark has, it's not as big a deal if someone needs to take a year or two off to change jobs. If you can't do your job anymore at some point for health reasons, there is a generous system for disability leave. And, a common unemployment insurance system (a-kasse) covers being unemployed for up to two years, with up to ~$36k/yr salary and retraining / job-finding assistance. As a last resort, there's a floor of ~$22k/yr welfare that anyone can get if they have no other source of income, with no time limits. That's comparable to the low end of U.S. Social Security, so at least nobody would really end up with no income.
The wager is that enough people would be productive post-65 to have a significant overall effect.
> a large proportion of people could work in some job up to age 80 (possibly after changing jobs)
It would be an interesting question given most of the aged people change their job. Then those categories of jobs would probably be overrun by aged people seeking those jobs, and hence poor wages and rampant unemployment.
By the time robots take over software development, they will also be causing such a disruption in all other work positions that society as a whole will have to find a different paradigm from the current "everybody works for a living".
There must be several things you can do with 30 years of firefighting experience that is useful to others without you needing to physically go out an fight fires, especially if you, financially, only need to work one or two days a week.
>he suggested people should work to age 80, but work proportionally less in all the years up to there.
At 70, your body is generally not able to do the same things you were doing at 20/30, at least not with the same ease. A 75 year old man could work as hard as a 25 year old man, but the same amount of work will probably take a greater toll on his health.
In a way, seems like his scheme is pretty much geared to make people dread reaching old age, and a reduction in pension payments would come from all the people committing suicide after facing the realization that as their bodies become more tired and less resilient, they will have to work harder.
Is it really more impractical for a 70-year-old to work 25 hours, than for a 60-year-old to work 40 hours? The latter is widely expected today, and we expect 60-year-olds to work as hard as 25-year-olds. Otherwise, we'll hire the 25-year-old over them. If that's a problem, we should change it across the board.
Note that this proposal is also in the context of a system that provides full support for job retraining and unemployment pay in the gaps (and a good disability and mental-health system), so if you run into serious problems you have options.
Sorry, I misread your comment. I had understood it as "work more as you get closer to 80", and not the inverse, which is the premise of his suggestion.
Maybe wanting to stop working at 65 and step into full retirement is particular to the American system. Most 70 year olds I know would like some kind of job/retirement hybrid: work 30 hours a week, have longer vacation times, more flexible hours, not losing the job when you have to take a leave for medical reasons, etc.
Ah right, I see that reading now. I didn't mean that working hours is proportional to age; just that you work "proportionally less" pre-65 in the sense that you work more post-65 than the current norm of "none", and then reallocate those extra person-years of productivity to reduce the pre-65 work week.
Unless you're mining coal, no. It's normally because you ate shit and had a high stress life and pursued sedentary activities and/or alcohol to unwind. If you take care of your body, it rarely breaks down at age 70. Age 90, then I'll give you a pass on being old.
Because you don't think as clearly anymore, you can't have as much fun anymore, your sense aren't as good anymore. Shit, you can't go to a club and flirt with 20-something hot chicks, ok? Weed and alcohol aren't much fun anymore. Your idea of fun is actually borin*g and you don't even know it because you have difficulty grasping half the stuff that's going around you. You are just old. In pain. Slow. Afraid. SUCKS!
> At 70, your body is generally not able to do the same things you were doing at 20/30, at least not with the same ease.
My father is almost 70, and going on hikes with him leaves me pretty winded. Certainly no walk in the park. I'm just a little more than one third of his age. If he would do some strength training in addition to his jogs and hikes, I imagine he would be in great overall shape.
I don't think that I'll necessarily be anywhere near his physical fitness when that time comes. But with retirement or a decreased workload, I intend to dedicate more time to keeping fit and treating my body as more of a temple.
With societies obsession over youth these days, it's gonna be interesting to see how the youth of today hold up in forty to fifty years.
My father in law is turning 78 and still does 200km bike rides that I cant keep up with. He trains very dedicated about 5 times a week for the last 15 years. Which was the mOst surprising part to me. I always thought no performabce could be gained that late in life much less so much.
Your father has a lot of time for recovery, making all the perfect food and exercising in the first place that lets him beat the average chair sitting office worker.
> Hence the somewhat curious (and I think, very American) idea of the "Golden Years". If you put your head down and work hard, taking no vacations, until you're age 65, then you flip 180 degrees in the other direction and retire into a life of full-time leisure. So if you live long enough, it really won't be a waste; you cash it in all at the end!
And this exact kind of thinking is what the societal overlords want you to subscribe to. Give them the best years of your life to get a degree of freedom later in your life, when the freedom won't matter anymore anyway, cause you'll be pissing in your diapers and be limited to a very small subset of things a healthy young person can do.
I see it this way: when you're retired and old, the overall potential of what you can do with your life is much lower than that of when you were in your 20s and 30s. Why is that? Because an old person with the same amount of time and money can do much less with those resources than a young person.
When you live your life like a run off the mill robot, living your life according to a set of societal expectations and rules set by other people, what's the point of such a life anyway?
PS. OP, I wasn't addressing you, in case you feel I've attacked your point, I am just furthering it :)
I always kind of shake my head at this. On a board with many people making 100k+ per year, who are the "societal overlords" you're referencing. Sure there are people that make much more than that, but anything beyond 80k allows a person to save quite a bit and "quit" the rat race earlier if they like.
But that's human nature, we're designed to always keep climbing up and striving for more.
It is not healthy to constantly compare yourself with people who are worse off. Sure, it induces a sense of gratitude to know that you have clean drinking water and no threat of being killed by a warlord today (unlike many people in Africa, for instance), however if we settled for that, there would never be any incentive to improve our situation further. Imagine what would've happened if every inventor and scientist in the history of mankind had that attitude.
Also, not everyone on this board lives in Silicon Valley and works for a startup that spoils him stupid with catered lunches, scheduled massages and a 150K/yr salary. A lot of us are just normal middle class people living in economies that aren't that prosperous and the prospect of losing a job can really threaten our financial security. Also, if you work for a shit company that takes advantage of that, you can be in for a pretty miserable experience. So get off your high horse already.
Come on, human nature? Designed to keep striving? I've heard this referenced as "keeping up with the Joneses" when it's about matching consumption to your neighbors'.
I never thought "keeping up with the Joneses" is part of my human nature. Or even my culture.
The 'societal overlords' from previous posts you have now ascribed to human nature (??) are really 'society', perhaps influenced by some ultra-elite cadre, sure.
If anything, Homo Sapiens was designed (read evolved) to be flexible because species that hard-coded their responses to the environment went extinct when the environment changed. So the only thing that could be coded into human behavior was to try to be "better". Better than what was left intentionally blank. At least, that's how I see it.
There is a popular TED talk on motivation, he postulates that growth is one contributing component of motivation. This may be his anecdote, but this guy has helped many people get back their motivation.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
Being "poorer" does not necessarily mean you are worse off. There's a big difference between living in a mud puddle with AIDS and building a modest life outside of the rat race. Most of us living in those middle class suburbs are also burdening ourselves with payments for garbage we don't really need. We are burdening ourselves with larger houses to put all that garbage in.
"Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods…illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late."
Indeed. It never seems to never occur to some people that emergent behavior, arising from the (mis)alignment of incentives in a complex system, can give rise to behavior so bizarre and purpose-directed that it all seems deliberate -- as yet is nonetheless emergent. The whole system is a fractal, all the way to the top -- there are many uber-wealthy folks whose experiences are subjectively as miserable as Bukowski's was.
You just can't believe it because you believe in a magical hierarchy with the free ones on top -- but so do the ones way up there. My god, if you're even able to leave a comment, you're already better off than 99% of people alive today!
The "rat race" is a subjective, elective construct and, by definition you cannot escape it a long as you subscribe to it. The people you think have escaped it, or control it, are also trappe by it, no matter how hard that is for you to believe. The only ones who have truly escaped are the ones who have had a fundamental shift in the way they conceptualize work, career, goals, desires and everything.
Our current global economic system was intentionally designed by (and for) a very small Elite, over roughly 4 centuries. Those at the very top are certainly not typical victims [1] of the system they carefully create; indeed, history shows they constantly and incrementally revise it to their benefit.
[1] They're only victims if they go too far, trigger civil unrest, and wind up on the losing side of the guillotine.
"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's" -William Blake
I'd contend that it wasn't designed to any significant degree. As the parent poster is trying to tell you, it just is. The system we have is just the result of the emergent behaviour of humans interacting, it's more down to chance than design, even if some elements seem predictable.
We haven't yet found a way to fairly spread privilege in our societies, so we're stuck with the least worst system, but I would note that globalisation has actually raised living standards in many countries from India to China, in spite of, or perhaps because of its deleterious effects. People always want to hoard wealth (almost everyone does this, even those at the bottom), and it's hard to change that. It remains to be seen whether we can effectively temper human desires and spread that wealth and not end up in dystopia, but please don't try to blame things on a secret elite directing a carefully created system - it's a mirage and is not helpful. There are many contending forces vying for prominence in our societies, and in many ways corporations are more powerful than people or politicians (NB a corporation is not a CEO, it is a composite body).
The guillotine you mention was actually far worse for the ordinary people of France than for the aristocracy (many of whom simply fled) - terror and denunciation was used as a weapon on moderate politicians and everyday citizens, and even eventually the chief proponent of its use.
This leads to an interesting thought. If IP were free and we had the concept of a Jubilee (all debts forgiven at certain points in time), I think global human suffering would go down a lot.
I've been a fan of the emergent structure hypothesis for quite a long time, but I do feel that you are pushing it too far.
There have been, historically and presently, power and wealth grabs by the already powerful, and manipulation of political and social structures to suit their needs. To some extent this was easier historically, partly because there were fewer laws, but even now, with the legacy of hundreds of years of social and political reform, and a lot of it intended to liberate common people, there are still large distortions in our political systems that significantly mis-allocate power to the already powerful.
I would also take some umbrage with your statement that we "haven't yet found a way to fairly spread privilege in our societies" and your defence of the "least worst system" meme. Whilst there are aspects of the Western socio-political setup that are designed around the (reasonably) fair distribution of wealth, there remains constant pressure against legislation designed to develop the rights of common people in society. Indeed, those interested in reducing those rights are often able to gain popular support for their cause by positioning themselves as defenders of the wealth and power of those people whose wealth has recently increased - i.e. the middle classes, which now form a very significant political power base.
We do know of ways of more fairly distributing the rewards of labour (cooperatives come to mind, as a single example), but they are unpopular in a lot of the West, and if you look back to history you will see that that mentality was actively created to counter threats to vested interests. Ironically the system of laissez-faire capitalism that was adopted to counter these more de-centralised power structures ended up diluting the power base of the "old money" (and was eventually massively scaled back), though it persisted the fundamental inequality in wealth distribution.
I would, however, fully agree with your assertion that these problems are not (or at least very unlikely to be) the result of a direct conspiracy by some elite group. I don't think history supports that view, and I don't believe people are particularly capable of maintaining such a conspiracy for so long a period of time. It should be clear, however, that the "conspiracy" could itself be an emergent part of the system - a higher order structure that has managed to persist itself (thus far) without continuous direct human intervention, however that would make it not a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word.
N.B. This is obviously a pretty broad sweep based on my interpretation of history - if anyone has any corrections or comments I'd appreciate hearing them.
> There have been, historically and presently, power and wealth grabs by the already powerful, and manipulation of political and social structures to suit their needs.
Sure. But that does not conflict with "emergent structure": There's no need for a cabal at the top consciously arranging the structure of society. Just a bunch of people who are often trying to manipulate things in specific directions, and where a lot of them will have overlapping motivations. From the outside, that can look very much the same.
A lot of the time people are not necessarily even trying to steer things a certain way, but merely looking after their own interests.
E.g. a central idea in marxism is that the capitalist is not really at fault: He's "caught up" in the system just as much as the worker. He is exploiting people working for him, but he does not necessarily intentionally want to oppress. He is merely playing his role, protecting what he sees as his own interests, just like the workers.
And so you get "nice" capitalists, who try to do better, but they can still largely only act within the confines of their role: The only way the capitalist can top oppressing, is by ceasing to be a capitalist. But that is not in his interest, and it is unreasonable to expect the capitalist to willingly do so - he will find every excuse for not giving up his privilege (and many might be good; e.g. it is perfectly possible an individual capitalist might be doing more net good with his profit than it would have if he shared everything equally with his workers). Ultimately, marxism is cynical about human nature: We are all looking out for our own interests; to the extent we do not, it is because we lack awareness of our real interests or position.
That's right; as I said "these problems are not (or at least very unlikely to be) the result of a direct conspiracy by some elite group."
Further: "I don't think history supports that view, and I don't believe people are particularly capable of maintaining such a conspiracy for so long a period of time. It should be clear, however, that the "conspiracy" could itself be an emergent part of the system - a higher order structure that has managed to persist itself (thus far) without continuous direct human intervention, however that would make it not a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word."
I will also reiterate that just because there isn't a genuine conspiracy does not mean, as some (not you, here) conclude, that "the system" is as good as uncorrupted and can't be improved.
I'm not enough of a scholar of Marxism to disagree with your reading of it, but for my own part I would say that people are (obviously in my view) capable of acting in more than their own self interest, unless one insists on almost ridiculous contortions of their motives. This capability for action in the wider good can and should be harnessed by society, and my preference would be for this to take place in step with a broader decentralisation of power (and wealth).
Finally, I think a tiresome strand to this debate (not brought by you) is the idea that any kind of social improvement inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism. I know this view is a little passé, but I really see this as part of a set of propaganda disseminated by the powerful intended to counter challenges to their power. This certainly has historical precedent, and it is pretty clear that similar things happen today, often through support to favourable political parties, which comes with an influence over those parties' message. Of course, lots of other people buy into the propaganda, because it also serves their own (much smaller) interests.
I didn't claim our current system is perfect or uncorrupted (the phrase least worst system clearly points out that our current systems are flawed). I don't think social improvement (however you define that) inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism, but I do think people claiming to have all the answers to creating a fairer society have turned out to be tyrannical more often than not (e.g. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin etc), and I prefer the gradual, consensual move to socialism we have in Western Europe (a form of capitalism tempered by social justice and redistribution, far more equitable than in Marx's time for example). Blaming, dehumanising and scapegoating minority groups (the 1%, bankers, etc) to expiate our sins does nothing to help our society become more fair, quite the reverse.
The last century under moderated capitalism has seen much progress in conditions of work in the western world, and even recently in the developing world, and this in spite of the selfishness inherent in capitalism which you would think would tend to ever-increasing centralisation of power and wealth if left unchecked - I find that an interesting contradiction.
If people want to debate redistribution, what fair means, how to moderate capitalism or replace it and how to make our societies more fair that's (in my view) a useful debate, but diatribes about a shadowy conspiracy of a 1% elite spanning centuries are not productive, because they're not going to make people face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and their relations with others in society.
Sigh. Sorry to be rude, but I'm not sure if you properly read my post - it really wasn't a "diatribe[s] about a shadowy conspiracy of a 1% elite spanning centuries".
I wasn't referring to you when I indicated that some conclude that the system is "as good as uncorrupted and can't be improved", nor was I suggesting that you subscribe to "the idea that any kind of social improvement inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism". In both cases I was speaking about the opinions I encounter in this debate more generally.
As to the point you make in your second paragraph; it strikes me that the improvement in living standards is more to do with improvements in technology and political freedom than it is to do with the way our economy is organised. The idea that we owe these improvements to the economic structure is, however, prevalent; sometimes the idea is modified to say that the technological advancement we have enjoyed would have been impossible without the economic system we have.
Both forms of this idea fail to recognise that there have been numerous burst of technological and social advancement that haven't relied upon capitalism (e.g. the Romans, but also basically every civilisation in history), unless of course you broaden the definition of capitalism so much to include almost any commercial system, and both fail to offer evidence that capitalism was causal of, rather than merely temporally correlated with, the improvements in living standards. The negative evidence available, about systems which have historically been anti-correlated with progress (like the ones you mentioned), only covers a narrow range of possibilities, and are difficult to generalise from.
I should note that I'm strongly inclined to believe that there was a causal link between capitalism and the success of the industrial revolution and the things that followed (i.e. it was sufficient), but I am far less convinced that the form of capitalism used, which strongly concentrated power, was necessary, and I think that it is deleterious to broader society.
I, like you, "prefer the gradual, consensual move to socialism we have in Western Europe". This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly, and I find these ideas of conspiracy very boring, but I'm still wary of the notion that we should pretend that no one has an interest in concentrating power and wealth, and maintain the status quo. My reading of history, and the present, is that people do have such interests, and that they use both their power and their wealth to secure their positions. I fail to see why this is particularly controversial, except that it suggests moral culpability for actions that have, for a long time, been lauded.
I can see that you are not arguing to maintain the status quo, but I hope you recognise that the greater social justice in modern capitalism, which is constantly under attack from the right, was fought for over long periods. The rights we enjoy today were not given to us by the benevolence of our leaders.
Sigh. Sorry to be rude, but I'm not sure if you properly read my post - it really wasn't a "diatribe[s] about a shadowy conspiracy of a 1% elite spanning centuries".
That referred to the post which started this thread.
In both cases I was speaking about the opinions I encounter in this debate more generally.
Ok, I'm not sure there's much point in debating general opinion; it makes it very confusing if you attempt to debate interlocutors of your own invention.
I'm still wary of the notion that we should pretend that no one has an interest in concentrating power and wealth, and maintain the status quo. My reading of history, and the present, is that people do have such interests
Everyone has this interest, whether they have power and wealth presently or not, and whether they admit it or not, and I don't see it as culpable, merely something to be managed. It can even be healthy in small doses, in encouraging competition rather than resignation. I'm not sure many would claim that all progress comes via capitalism, but recent globalisation has resulted in a shift in wealth to countries which are developing due to trade, and I do find the question of how much regulated capitalism has contributed to global levelling an interesting one.
I brought common arguments into the discussion because it is, as with so many things, almost as much a debate about perceptions as it is about substantive facts. The number of people who subscribe to wild conspiracy theories, buy fully into the value of the status quo, or maintain more nuanced views, has a big impact on how our societies will develop.
Anyway, it seems to me that we largely agree on the appropriate means to desirable ends - nothing too dramatic.
That's my favourite passage from that pamphlet - surprisingly poetic writing for a manifesto - and it describes conditions in the current information economy rather well, even if the 'bourgeois epoch' has proven rather more resilient than he imagined:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The way I see it, political power grabs are simply a continuation of wealth accumulation. Money is limited in its value, but it's the best universal proxy for value that we have so people often equate them. It's better to see money as path to things that are actually valuable, such as food, water, shelter, and the ability to provide these for others or to hire them to do things.
If you think about wealth in this abstracted sense, a notch away from money, then you can see how basic trading dynamics might apply.
Yakovenko modelled the trading dynamics in a perfect game of chance (coin flips determine winners and losers). Something interesting emerged.
What it shows is that if everyone starts with the same amount of money, after a bit of random trading, their wealth is normally distributed (this is obvious if you are familiar with the binomial distribution). A few people are doing well, a few are doing badly, and most people are around where they started. As the trading continues though, it turns into a power curve where most people are doing badly and a few are taking everything. Its the same thing that happens when a rich man sits down at a poor man's poker table. He can keep putting him all in on every good hand and he only needs to be right maybe 1 in ten times and he wins everything. There's a runaeay effect after you hit a certain point.
Of course, things are a lot messier at this higher level interpretation of wealth since its harder to attach numbers to wealth in the form of political power, good health, and other factors which have a compounding effect (good health and political power help you make more money, but they cost money, so there's a feedback loop, but you xan equate them for simplicity). This is why people complain about a shrinking middle class.
The good news is that human life is messy we often allow our relationships to balance things out. The bad news is that we have gotten better and better at sterilizing our social and physical environments so the past might not predict what's coming next.
100K is the point where you have the illusion of financial freedom because you can purchase a BMW, buy a nice home in a bland cul-de-sac with a bunch of nameless white dudes, and it's not until you're in your 40s and you're in danger to losing the job to a robot or a whipper-snapper that you understand that kind of "freedom" is actually enslavement. You made the wrong choice because you wasted your life buying plastic.
I don't make 100K but I did recently have what you might call a religious epiphany about my job, my finances, and freedom. Luckily for me, I have little debt and actually like my job a lot so I'm not the hole some folks are, God bless them all.
I just hope most of us aren't Bukowski's age when we realize we were building useless bullshit for useless people in order to buy useless plastic garbage. I know some of us are doing important work, but many of us are not.
Jeez, guys, we get one chance at this. Most people are destined to live anonymous lives so at the very least try to enjoy it.
Here's the problem though - you don't need to buy the BMW or the suburban McMansion. Save that money instead and when you're in your 40 you can tell the boss that he should give you job to a whipper-snapper, you're headed to Thailand.
No one holds a gun to the consumer's head, they just convince themselves they need thing. Then they whine when they haven't saved more than 300k for retirement at age 50 and social security is looking rocky.
Definitely, and it's of course unfair to paint everyone with a broad brush as I know folks who are making near 100k and are donating 30% or more of their salary to charity. I just feel really angry about the US and the American culture since taking a recent trip overseas to one of those "third world" countries we roll our eyes about. Maybe not even angry, just sad and disappointed. We have so much production here, so much money, so much creativity and people seem to have nothing but fear and animosity. We've taken the richest nation ever assembled and used our resources to build a proto-police surveillance state and empire of nothing when we could have fixed the fucking world or at least fed and clothed most of it.
Probably though I just need to quit Facebook again.
>No one holds a gun to the consumer's head, they just convince themselves they need thing. Then they whine when they haven't saved more than 300k for retirement at age 50 and social security is looking rocky.
I think that we in the tech industry are... different here. In other industries, there is a /lot/ of pressure to look the part (well, to look an /expensive/ part.) Have you ever seen a real-estate agent in a car worth less than thirty grand? Hell, I've met a few sales folks and managers who wear watches they claim are worth at least half that.
Engineering is a little different in that we can dress down, and nobody is going to seriously give us shit for driving a piece of junk car. One can reasonably be a six-figure computer nerd and be a frugal person. A six figure salesman would be... well, he would be breaking a lot of expectations if he lived frugally.
"America is essentially about hustling, and that goes back more than 400 years. It’s practically genetic, in the U.S., by now; the programming is so deep, and so much out of conscious awareness, that very few Americans can break free of it. They’re really sleepwalking through life, living out a narrative that is not of their own making, while thinking they are in the driver’s seat. It’s also especially hard to break free of that mesmerization when everyone else is similarly hypnotized. Groupthink is enormously powerful. Even if it occurs to you to stop following the herd, it seems crazy or terrifying to attempt it. This is Sartre’s “bad faith,” the phenomenon whereby a human being adopts false values because of social pressure, and is thus living a charade, an inauthentic life. It’s also what happens to Ivan Illych in the Tolstoy story, where Ivan is dying, and reviews his life during his last three days, and concludes that it was all a waste, because he lived only for social approval."
There's a way out of the looking-the-part problem. Cultivate an image of an eccentric genius (and work hard to actually have genius level skills) and people will start to focus more on what you can do and less on what you look like you can do. In fact, that's why the tech industry seems to get an exemption -- they're mostly perceived as eccentric geniuses.
Also, spend lavishly on the best clothes, eat lavishly, but drive a very modest car and live in a modest home. People don't know what to make of that.
>This thread is showing the US bias of the forum again. Some of aren't earning enough to run a car let alone a modest one.
Really? huh. My experience has been that even foreign workers demand $10+ per hour, which is enough for a shitty car in a low cost of living area in the US. Good English is a reasonable multiplier.
You are not perceived as eccentric geniuses, not by anyone. Never, ever. They might say that to keep you on the treadmill but the the truth is that (especially by VCs) you are perceived as cannon fodder with a personal hygiene problem. You are kept around as long as you are useful and don't bitch too much. The minute that stops you are out on your ear. Welcome to the real world.
Yeah, uh, I didn't mention that you are only employed as long as the employer thinks you are useful because that's obvious, and is true across all fields. Dressing nice doesn't change that, except to the extent that dressing nice makes you more useful in your job role.
My point was just that if you are in management or sales, it seems that having expensive clothing and an expensive car are part of that 'being useful' - Appearance is a huge part of those jobs that are primarily human interaction. Appearance is a hugely important when dealing with other humans. I mean, I'm not saying that social skills and appearance don't matter for the technical individual contributor; they do, but it is not everything (like it is for management and sales.) It is possible to be technically good enough that people are willing to employ you in spite of your poor social skills. Obviously, that isn't the case for sales and management (as those jobs are, in a very real sense, social skills in and of themselves.)
Also note: If you are dealing directly with VC, you are more sales/management than an individual contributor.
You're clearly thinking of IT support and entry level programmers. They're not judged at that level. However, if you have 5-10 years industry experience, a degree and have worked in some management capacity, you're expected to look a certain part. Unless, that is, you're known for doing things that other people say can't be done. Then you get to live simply. Anecdotally, and off the top of my head, I can name at least half a dozen people like that I've worked with in just the past six months.
Also, might want to work with that resentment problem of yours.
>>> have worked in some management capacity, you're expected to look a certain part
If you're talking about dressing cleanly, not betraying only passing acquaintance with showers by one's smell and being able to appear in public without shocking small children into tears - yes, sure. But that costs next to no money. Beyond that - nobody could care less which car you're driving and which house you're living in, unless you're a bank president or some other C level executive or business owner, where your conspicuous consumption skills may imply the success of your business. If you, however, are a professional, there's no problem with living simply, should you wish so, if that doesn't imply looking like a dervish or living literally in a cave.
>There's a way out of the looking-the-part problem. Cultivate an image of an eccentric genius
Yeah, this is what I was talking about with our industry being different. This is... common for programmers. You don't even have to be uncommonly good, just useful.
But I think this is dramatically harder in other industries; to the point where I've never met, say, a real-estate agent like that, or a lawyer.
>> Have you ever seen a real-estate agent in a car worth less than thirty grand?
I've not only seen such an agent, I've engaged hers & his (they're a couple) services to buy my house. And it was just fine. Of course, I don't know the exact price tag on their car, but it was a moderately old suv, nothing flashy, probably nowhere near 30K. Actually, I'd be more vary of an agent with a really expensive car - if he's already so rich, would he care about getting my money enough?
The vast majority of people will get married and have kids and actually want to enjoy life a little bit while working 9-5.
They want to stay near their close family & friends, because they love them and want to see them and want their kids to grow up around them. Which means spending X per month on a house.
They want to have a car that doesn't embarrass them when they drive into work or round their friends, because owning a BMW has been a secret dream and it's a totally reasonable price, and a smooth ride and great acceleration.
They value different things than you and that all costs money.
I'm actually somewhere between the 'norm' and your view, but at least I'm realistic enough to realise that my priorities are different to most people's. I understand why they buy what they buy.
> They want to have a car that doesn't embarrass them when they drive into work or round their friends, because owning a BMW has been a secret dream and it's a totally reasonable price, and a smooth ride and great acceleration.
This is really pushing it. Anybody buying a BMW on $100k in Silicon Valley while paying SV-level rents is a pretty big over-consumer. If you have a family on top of that, well... you won't be retiring any time soon.
I also find it odd that you jump immediately from "a car that doesn't embarrass them" to BMW. There's no in between? You have to go all the way to a luxury BMW to not be embarrassed by your car?
By all means, if you really value owning a BMW then get one, but unless you're making considerably north of $100k you don't have a strong case for not being an over-consumer.
You know how much $100k was when the term "six figure salary" started being used in the early 60s? Let me put it this way. The rich Donald Draper on Mad Men made $45k. $100k would have been more like $800k today. That was a CEO's salary. A "six figure salary" today is nothing like what it was when that term was coined.
> A "six figure salary" today is nothing like what it was when that term was coined.
Exhibit A is whenever a story about public employees makes the front page of HN (for example, the Detroit bankruptcy or the BART strike) and people start freaking out about train operators making $100K: "They don't even have college degrees, for godsakes!"
Well there's the thing: $100k salaries are most commonly made in portions of the world where lots of people make $100k salaries, thus merely increasing locational inequality while not actually pushing up the quality of life for the highly skilled workers commensurately with the income.
What I've seen in my friends is that certain men will buy an expensive car on a loan, keep it 3-4 years and then swap it for a family friendly car when they have kids. Often they will buy the car 2nd hand.
The car retains the majority of its value, they enjoy the car, they're not actually spending massive amounts of money like you seem to think they are. It's essentially a hobby item that they enjoy driving.
And it's only a proportion of my friends, some just get other cars that are a lot cheaper to run.
If that was always the case, leasing agencies wouldnt be able to make profit, so you might just have stumpled on some really good offers which popup from time to time. In general, leasing costs hould be equal to or more than the deprecation in value of the car itself.
I agree with kayoone; it doesn't really seem like this could consistently be true or else it would just be bad business.
In general, though, the best way to combat the depreciation of a car's value is to take out a long-term 0% interest loan, provided of course that you can get it. This works because (1) inflation reduces your effective net expenditure on the car; (2) you can take the cash you would have spent on the car and invest it instead; if you even conservatively get 3% returns a year, you've still come out far ahead.
Regarding (2), if you can't afford the car in cash, then you can't afford the car. That's always been my motto. Financing is a choice; it should never be something you are forced to do, unless this is your first car straight out of school and you just have no money yet.
It's children that are the real financial issue. Even one child, last I heard, is the difference between early retirement as a reward for spending your 20s and 30s on grad-student frugality while earning plenty of money, and just having to work a 9-5 until it kills you.
N of one here. I have on child. Started saving in early 20's because I remembered two things my parents struggled with in the 80's. 1) being under water wrt their mortgage and 2) just making ends meet meant that they were never able to effectively save for retirement until they were in their mid/late 30's.
Got married to someone who thinks like I do wrt to retirement and with one child we are on track to 'retire' when we want to. Barring us doing something dumb or global financial meltdowns - by mid 50s or so. I put retire in quotes because who believe in retirement where one site on their ass all day and says I'm so glad I don't have to work any more? I don't. Retirement means we will be able to give meaningful time to .org's that need it. But this will still be 'work'. I can't imagine a worse hell than retirement where I have no meaningful work to do.
Note: with two or more children much of what I can still do would need to be re-evaluated.
This is one reason the wife and I will not have a child.
The cost is over a $1,000,000 (with a Dr. Evil pinky). If you look at the costs online, then you will see something between $200K to $400K depending on how good of parent are you. However, this doesn't bring in the opportunity cost of investing. If you just take the 18 year time span, then the first year is insanely expensive. Now, imagine it expanding 30, 40, 50 years out.
BMW makes a nice car and there's nothing specifically wrong with buying a nice house, I just mention it as American iconography. Not sure about the cul de sac though.
And it wasn't what we would consider a "nice house" in the present day. It's not on a cul de sac and it's no McMansion, just a house that a guy used to living in boardinghouses, bedsits, and apartments for fifty years would be proud of.
Water view, but it's of the harbor, which is mainly shipping. Kind of like the difference of a bay view from Oakland, CA and the SF Peninsula, Tacoma/West Seattle and Magnolia, or Newark and Manhattan.
the misrepresentation is your post is the word 'buy'. You don't buy when a bank owns it and expects you to pay monthly payments. You buy when you own. Is it a big deal to loose job at 45 when you own house and a car or two? It is, but not as much because you don't have the obligation to spend half your previous salary monthly on payments. Which takes us directly to this where the problem really is: debt.
You're just playing with words though. People choose to use debt, I've got debt, on the car we just bought, that's it. I HAD debt, but the student loans are now paid and the house was sold.
Am I lucky to make a good salary that allows me to pay these things down? Absolutely. However, I'm also responsible for the choices I make. Many people make more than I do and don't save as much, many More people make less and drive cars that are twice as expensive as mine.
I don't think I played with the words. No debt == freedom. And to have no debt isn't easy mostly due to social pressure - keeping up with the Jones. But it wouldn't really hurt to plan in such a way that before one hits 45 they are debt free and own house among other things.
There's a lot of hyperbole about "debt," I see propagated about, especially amongst the far-left and far-right. Debt != Slavery. Conversely, No Debt != Freedom, there are plenty of people I know with no debt who are no more free to do what they please than the people I know with crushing debt.
Debt is leverage. Leverage, applied correctly, is an excellent means for accelerating the furtherance of a goal. Is having debt on a house a bad thing? Certainly not in a rising market, or in a market where rents tend to exceed mortgage payments. Additionally, equity gained in that house can be leveraged when times get rough in the future, or a new opportunity arises. Most people do not have the capital power to buy a home outright, even after many years of saving -- if you're spending on rent, you likely cannot save enough for an entire home in one lump sum. Most notably, you'd have to have a very smart growth strategy on that saving to beat both inflation and the rising prices of homes in the area you want to live over the course of the 15-20 years you'd have to employ that strategy. Therefore, for those with the wherewithal to manage their leverage correctly and effectively, a loan makes a lot of sense - they don't have to pay the rents, and they've gambled, successfully or otherwise TBD, against the future price of that home. They can as well make a decision to take gains early, long before ever having had to lay out the entire capital should their local market rise. In the case of 20% down on a $100k house that increases to $200k in value over 3 years with a total of $24k spent in payments over that time = $100k in returns for $44k invested, or a profit of $56k, with no additional rent charges during that time.
In addition, the same can run true for a vehicle. If a person needs a vehicle for transportation, they can apply leverage, especially if they do so wisely, to purchase a vehicle better suited to their needs than their normal cash flow allows. I, for example, could be fine with a 20-year old vehicle that needs regular maintenance. I can do that maintenance myself. Someone else may rightly say a 5-6% interest rate over three years is less costly to them than monthly visits to their mechanic.
So, this "debt is bad," thing is mostly stated by people who get leveraged beyond their means, or don't understand how to successfully apply the right amount of leverage at the right time. No debt can be as bad for one's fortunes as too much debt.
Very few Americans (or otherwise) could consider the idea of owning a house and a car outright at 45 without ever having taken on debt.
Debt is a time machine. You get today the money that you may have in 30 years. Of course, if you watched any sci-fi movies, you know what happens when you abuse time machines... bad, bad things.
Debt isn't bad, debt is great - provided a) your time machine use doesn't cost too much and b) you really will have this money in the future (or, in other words, can keep up with the payments). Most problems with debt stem from misunderstanding the concept that it doesn't produce money, only shifts money around in time, and does not produce, but rather consume money - and of course from failure, deliberate or out of ignorance, to predict one's future amount of money. People also tend to double-count future money - once they debt-shifted it to present, they still consider it being there in the future, available for another debt-shift. This is where the trouble starts.
I think more and more Gen Y people in advanced European countries see owning a car as a failure - you are a fool for wasting money, when transportation can be done cheaply and also often for free. You are basically penalized for owning a car by high taxes, and for those few occassions in a year when you need a car (moving stuff) it's easy enough to rent. Spending your life in traffic jams is just a plain fail.
Having to wear a nice suit is also a failure. I would never consider working anywhere where I have to wear a suit.
Edit: My overarching point being that attitudes are changing. The 'American dream' doesn't really apply anymore, and especially not everywhere.
Agreed, the absolutely pervasive 1960s car culture in America seems to be vanishing, and it is on its way to becoming more of a quite-popular hobby. Traffic is worse, insurance is expensive and now may incorporate your credit score, and driving a car gives the police carte blanche to search and violate your civil rights under the flimsiest of excuses. More young people, other than those in very rural areas, are interested in re-urbanizing and riding a bicycle. As both a motorsports / driving enthusiast and bicyclist I think this is great.
I think you may need to recalibrate your idea of failure. I own a car specifically so I can load it up with gear at the weekends and go diving or camping. I know a few people who are rabidly anti-car and ride fixies. They spend their weekends bar-hopping and nursing hangovers. Fair enough, but that's not the lifestyle that particularly interests me.
Having to wear a nice suit is not failure either. Both cars and suits are just tools. It's what you use a tool for that matters. Also I'll note if you resent wearing a suit, you have never actually worn a nice one...
Most of the SF people I know who use a car only on weekends just use Zipcar or a rental for that. Depends on precisely how often you use it, but if you're not driving the car daily for commute, the economics of owning vs. renting shift considerably.
Fair enough point of using a car for outdoor hobbies - I'd call it an exception to the rule, an appropriate use of technology. But let's face it, in most cases it isn't like that.
Regarding my suit comment, it's about looking into the mirror in the morning and thinking whether the person you see is really who you once aspired to be.
Some people like to wear suits. One of my friend's greatest days was when just off high school he got straight into finance and finally could wear a suit 24/7. It genuinely makes him happy, it's an extension of his personality. He wants to be the big-shot-80s-New-York-cocaine-snorting-penthouse-owner-investment-banker type of guy.
But for me and I guess many others, to walk the earth in a suit would be, I don't know...perhaps the antithesis of existence. I think most people never think about it and even enjoy the office culture in a perverse way. Perhaps it's some form of a groupthink empathy, a we're-all-in-this-together style of getting a kick out of this masked suffering. I remember being a small kid and swearing I'd never be like an office manager or the bankers I saw, all wearing the same suits and becoming an empty shell that just assumes whatever of a corporate idenitity, becoming an embodiment of a foreign entity. Really just a zombie or a host for a parasite until it chews you out.
Because it does chew you out exactly as stated in this Bukowski letter, you're not really getting out. All the prices, the whole economy is set upon this 40-hour workweek, wage slave reality. All value is derived from this standard. I saw this very clearly 20+ years ago without even knowing the proper vocabulary to understand it. It's surprising how simple and clear it is, yet it's collectively decided that we don't want to look at it, we don't want to face it. You want out? The only way is to become the embodiment of the hope of getting out - a well-known star that can sell us the dream. And we'll gladly pay for it!
But you're right, the binge-drinking, fixed-bike urbano hipster thing is also a joke. We're all a joke in the end. But at least we could maybe strive to be funnier than we are because the joke is getting old.
Try living in something like Silicon Valley and not owning a car. Shopping for groceries would probably take a whole day, if you're lucky, and you can forget about doing anything else.
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway
lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but
not something that applies to the here and now. Instead
— out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly
payments on things we don't really need — we quarantine
our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as
we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called
"lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory — a
smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase
the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
It is funny you should say this. A friend recently had me interview for his company. He is a great guy, works too much, wakes up in the middle of the nights when he is on call. His boss started off by agreeing that yes, the friend worked too much. He may even have used the word burning out. He then hastened to tell me about his theory in life. Your 20s and 30s are meant to be a time for learning. Apparently, this "learning" involves working on these problems day in and day out. So the burning out was a good thing. Then, in your 40s, you start earning money. I could be a tech-lead or a manager, he said. Then, in my fifties, I could enjoy. He did this. He was happy with it, he said.
My reply to this: anytime I see 50 year old bold fat guy in a Porsche 911 it's depressing.
EDIT: should really be pathetic and sad and not depressing, but I think you get my point. Youth and health are so precious that no amount of money compensates ever.
If even that were true! I really don't see my 40s and 50s being better than now. Personally, my biggest weakness is that I am passionate about the technology and getting my hands dirty. If I start getting practice in management, crafting bold powerpoints, dressing up, etc. I think I'd go far in tech in my later days. But I won't because I love getting my hands on code. sigh
How about a 50 year-old slim guy with a full head of hair and a 911? Is that pathetic? Why? That would be me (minus the 911). I'm too frugal to buy a 911 but if another guy has socked away two or three million $ (or more) over the course of his tech career, how is this different than a 25yo with a big exit buying a 911? You seem a bit misinformed about age, a bit of an age-ist perhaps: I'm healthy and can bench press more now than in my entire weight-lifting life (since about 22). I agree with you that "kids" (i.e. people 20-30 :-) ) in tech are very often suckered into giving up their young lives to their tech employers. I saw this happening in the mid-90s at M$ and in their Seattle-area wannabes. I never participated in that, my time outside of the 9-5 norm was precious to me. You are right that "no amount of money compensates ever" for those years if they are lost.
jewish proverb/saying: it is better to be young, rich and healthy than old, poor and sick.
all your efforts are to look younger, but this is lost as your youth is long gone. if you think you made great use of it by sitting at the office... well not even sure how to comment on this.
let me rephrase it: guy in 911 in his 50s even in great shape is a little bit like a woman in her 50s in great shape who just had a boob job done.
You know what's more pathetic and sad? A 50 year old fat guy with no financial security. Even more pathetic is a 20-30-something thinking life ends at 50.
May be he was lucky and it worked for him. I am not sure that would work well all the times. It is not
necessary that the skills you acquire working harder would make you still relevant (as tech lead or manager) when you are in your forties and fifties. At the same time it is no guarantee that you would still be employed in the same organization where you worked hard during your twenties and thirties.
I think not burning out, being healthy, staying fit and to never stop learning would work better.
The "Golden Years" are not what they used to be. The WWII generation likely thought that way, but what I see on the ground now is not working hard to cash in, its working hard in terror of a coming time when you can't work. If you haven't saved enough by that time you die in misery and poverty. Eek over the line and if you don't get an unlucky disease, you get a modicum of comfort.
"Enjoy your Golden years" has turned into "Winter is coming."
Unless you are a hedonist, maximum leisure in your prime working years and minimum leisure in old age don't make sense. Personally, I've found work matured both me and my brothers, gave us more perspective, and generally improved us as human beings.
Without including the chance to really mature, you are basically talking about extending adolescence, and we already complain about how irresponsible and short-sighted twenty-year-olds are today.
When you say 'work' you have to be be explicit in what you mean. Do you mean 'work' as it has come to mean in the industrial capitalist revolution way? Or the kind of 'work' that, say, a forager/gather type society would do? It could mean effort towards creating something new and neat, like music or story telling.
The reason I ask is because without distinctions, it is difficult to tell what your motivations are and what about what kind of work you find attractive.
As a side note, the word 'work' of the industrial revolution sense being combined with notions that it automatically makes you better than people who don't 'work' in the same sense because it makes them more childish was one of those 'white-man's burden' type justifications for imperialism because of that particular poem's observation that non-european first nation people were 'half-devil and half-child'.
NOT an accusation of you. Just an observation. :) This is and, will be, a contentious topic in the near future, I think.
I took "work" to mean purpose, which applies in either case.
The problem comes when people limit themselves to a singular purpose and spend the rest of their time being consumers. The don't learn and grow and so end up in this rut for the duration. You're left with aging, atrophied, one-dimensional automatons who don't know anything else besides the grind and T.V. to relax in the evening. Rinse, repeat. When they retire they have no idea what to do with themselves and the thought of figuring it out probably makes them anxious so they stick to what they know.
Weirdly, lots of folks I know at retirement age retire, then simply have no idea what to do with themselves. They've never cultivated a meaningful hobby or interest in the all the years of workaholism. The ones that vaguely remember something they wanted to do in their 20s find themselves fighting off a constant urge to sit in an office and work.
A few folks I've known worked until they simply couldn't, then died a few months later.
I'm reminded of my own father, who worked like a dog since he was a pre-teen, and simply hasn't been able to come to terms with retirement, choosing to start another job in his elder years instead of writing, painting and fishing which he has an obvious talent and interest in.
I tell myself that I won't succumb to this failure to live life and try to overcompensate a bit by traveling a lot, photography and many stalled attempts at writing. I wonder what would happen if I got fuck you money and if I could discipline myself to follow up to my passions instead of trying to fit them into my free time.
At around 42:00-56:00, (I made a note because I liked it so much), they start talking about safety nets and how we think about events changing our behavior. Merlin made the point that if you're not practicing enjoying your weekends now, having a lot of money can give you a more expensive weekend, but not necessarily a more enjoyable one. A more productive strategy is to rehearse how to be happy with what you have, not what it would be like if you didn't have to worry about anything (because that's probably never going to happen).
> Hence the somewhat curious (and I think, very American) idea of the "Golden Years". If you put your head down and work hard, taking no vacations, until you're age 65, then you flip 180 degrees in the other direction and retire into a life of full-time leisure. So if you live long enough, it really won't be a waste; you cash it in all at the end!
Also odd is the flip at the other end of the scale. You live your childhood, go to college and don't need to think much about career and then all of a sudden you get sucked into the cycle (graduating from college.) I was working from an internet cafe in the Philippines the other day (my connection at home was down and I needed to knock some stuff out) and while I was busting my ass the the kids (late high school and college aged) in there were playing games or checking Facebook. Occasionally there is someone in there working on homework.
The economy here in the Philippines sucks. These kids will graduate from college and be lucky to make minimum wage, which is $5 - $6 per day. A good job where I live in the Philippines is a call center position which pays something like $300 / month. Of course, the call centers require that you have a college degree. Even a lot of cashier positions at the local stores require a college degree. Because labor is so cheap, it's not uncommon to walk into a small store and see a half dozen workers behind the counter where in the U.S. you might only see one or two. That doesn't mean the service is better though. ;)
So, talk about slavery. I want to tell these people who are going to college and playing online games during their off-time that they are being conned. They are wasting their time going to college and then wasting their free time thinking college will bring success. What they really need to be doing is exiting the system and plowing their own path. There is nothing preventing them from doing what I do, sitting right next to them making in one day what they might make in a month. Good thing they haven't figured that out yet, I might have a bit of competition!
Depends on the kinds of achievements? Unless your achievements positively impacted other people's lives, I wouldn't imagine them being important on your deathbed. Then again, I don't have much experience with deathbed regrets.
Depends on the work, I think? If it's degrading nonsense done for the nonsensical greed of others, sure. But there is no reason to assume or accept this as the only possible kind of work. Why would a doctor not feel good about all the time they spent helping patients, if they were passionate about it, for example?
Sure, you need to find a balance, for yourself and friends and family. But where work is utterly separate from being alive I think something is broken. Just consider what dogs enjoy doing most: running after stuff and biting it. You could say, doing their job, that's what makes them fucking happy. Most animals are harder to read than dogs when it comes to happiness, but I really don't see dragging anyone "dragging their feet to work" except humans, and maybe some animals that lived too close to humans, or were caged by them.
Just as an anecdote, my 85-year old peasant grandmother told me this last time I saw her: "I wish my feet won't hurt so much so that I could still work". She's been married since 17 and I don't think she's had a day of vacation in her entire life. Cows and pigs and what-have-you don't feed by themselves.
I think you've missed the point of the letter entirely. It's not about people who are obsessed with their work, it's about people who have no choice in the matter.
The system isn't capitalism, it's life: you don't work, you don't eat. The author was one of the few whose work is both enjoyable on its own and worth enough to others to survive on, capitalism in the form of sponsorship. Capitalism at least gives a generally fair exchange of work for value; the alternatives amount to institutionalized theft.
Wow. Just wow. Simply amazing you can think that given the distribution of wealth in the world. The only reason the vast majority of us have to work to eat is because the vast majority of the proceeds from our labor go to benefit a tiny global elite.
For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost. And yet we don't – instead the vast majority of us continue to work hard to provide that global elite their "due".
Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Are you sure we have all the fuel and land to feed, house and clothe everyone? And if so, who's going to work for that? If everyone gets food and shelter for free, I'm not working to provide that.
The reality is, food needs to be grown, clothes made and houses built. Some people need to work for that. In exchange for that work, they ask some sort of compensation from others, in the form of other services or goods. This has nothing to do with the "global elite", this is just the nature of trade. I think giving someone stuff for free without getting anything in return is a greater injustice than this "instutionalized theft" you speak of.
You do that because you have a reasonable expectation that they'll help you back in the future, though. If you have a coworker that always needs help and never contributes anything back, eventually you'll start grumbling and stop helping. (Such coworkers usually eventually get fired in well-performing organizations, or marginalized and ignored in poorly-performing ones.)
> The only reason the vast majority of us have to work to eat is because the vast majority of the proceeds from our labor go to benefit a tiny global elite.
Explain how this works logically. Do you honestly believe that if you simply took most of the money from rich people, that you would be able to sustainably feed everyone else? Have you considered all, if any, of the potential consequences of this action?
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Again, explain how this works. A major issue with food, for example, is not one of production but instead transportation and distribution. How would making the rich poorer solve this problem?
> Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
Define justice.
And who on Earth do you trust to take and do well with all of the money taken from rich people?
Positive rights vs. negative rights. I reject the notion of "positive rights" on the grounds that forcing other people to do things for you at gunpoint (actual or implied) is morally wrong. I support your right to not get killed; I do not support your "right" to threaten the life of another to compel him to improve your situation.
If they're not paying, they're trespassers. Out. They're free to pursue their right to life without violating someone else's, and they've got far more ability to provide for themselves than you're giving them credit for.
Charity has its place, I advocate and facilitate it, and am not under any delusion that it comes from compelling others to contribute.
That's what I thought. You are not against threatening somebodies life to compel him to improve someones situation in general. You are perfectly fine with that when it's done to protect the right to do whatever you like with the things you own.
There are a lot of people such as you that think that right to own things and do whatever you like with the things you own trumps pretty much every other right. Including the right not to get killed of the people who'd try to steal your stuff. Fortunately lawmakers in lots of first world countries got passed that barbaric notion. In my country for example you can't hurt the thief. You can try to hold him until the police comes, but if you beat the shit out of him or set a booby trap to harm him you will be prosecuted because you endangered his life and health, a value more important than your petty stuff. Same way you can smash the window of a car parked in the sun on a hot day if you see dog left inside. You are violating less important right to protect higher value.
Also, keep in mind that money is not wealth. This "global elite" is not hoarding food, fuel or other basic necessities, they only have the money. New money can be printed, old money can be destroyed, new currencies can be created. The only real wealth is goods and services created/rendered by working people, and this "global elite" doesn't really have a strong grip on that.
Yes. Money is just a way of figuring out how much of the economical output of the whole system each money holder can use. By hoarding money rich don't do much harm.
The problem is not that they have a lot of money. The problem is what they do with the money. Of course it's not all bad. There are things that rich people made that benefited everybody, but I'm guessing most such things were created on the way to getting rich.
The other thing rich people hoard is real estate. This increases price of one of most basic necessities. This also degrades the real estate resource because more people have to rent, and people who live in their own house tend to care about its state more than people who rent and people who own house just to rent it away.
In principle, I agree. However, since the bubble crashed a few years back, real estate prices have been going down like crazy in many places (both US and Europe), because of the reduced demand.
Like you said "bubble". So it's not "going down like crazy" it just readjusts to level closer to sane price.
And that reduced demand doesn't come from people needing less real estate to live. Just from the fact that real estate reached prices that most people can't afford even if they pay with slaving their whole life for mortgage.
Reasonable price for apartment would be what most people could save up during the time they still live with their parents. But since real estate backed credit is legal that's not gonna happen. Such credit allows people to sell their future work in a manner almost perfectly safe for the bank. Thanks to this since you need place to live to have a life it can cost huge part of what you earn in life.
This shouldn't be a problem, especially in the US, where there is so much empty space. Maybe more in the tiny Europe, but there is still a lot of empty space here, and a lot of empty houses in remote villages.
The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
>This shouldn't be a problem, especially in the US, where there is so much empty space.
If you spread population of the world to occupy all the land evenly it would be only 300 feet from each person to its closes neighbors. So it's not that much free space.
> The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
And this makes the problem of price elevation from hoarding real estate even more pronounced.
> The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
People will live where they can find jobs, and the very concentration of people brings in even more jobs to cities. As much as some cite the amenities of large cities to stay, a very large portion of the retiring population move away as soon as they don't need to work anymore.
Average world per capita income, world GDP divided by population, is US$12,000/yr (PPP accounted for). That counts as the basic poverty line in the USA.
The tiny global elite you impugne does not hoard anything relevant. They are just a hose thru which a lot of high velocity money flows, most of their income flowing right back out to others. Without them, the structure for working for that $12,000 average income would collapse and you'd be working a lot harder for a lot less net return.
Take that high density money away from that elite, and you'll discover two things happen. One, you'll be out of a job and relegated to living exactly as a large percentage of world population does: eking out a meager existence from the land to paltry returns; that elite holds the high-wage system together because they profit from it, and without those returns there is little incentive to make such systems work. Two, averaging out all income & wealth so everyone has the same would soon coalesce back into the distribution we have now: those expecting a no-effort living wage produce nothing and get nothing for it, while those enticed by work*risk=profit will find a way and earn that which the others will give to survive.
Yes, institutionalized theft: those who work and take risks having their earnings taken by threat of force by those having no moral & economic interest therein or beyond what was contracted for in a competitive market. Go live off the land for a year, excluding any connection to "the elite", and then tell me about the justice of someone taking the fruits of your labors from you simply because they exist (choosing not to produce).
And there is zero effort put into figuring out a better system, since those in position of wealth and power don't have an incentive to change what feeds them.
With less than 5% people employed in agriculture [1], it must be possible to allocate resources in a way that does not require most people to waste their lives in jobs. The universal basic income, for instance, would achieve that without abolishing capitalism.
The only problem are people who glorify employment.
Just 5% of people are employed in agriculture precisely because "those in position of wealth and power" DID allocate resources in a way that does not require most people to waste their lives toiling in fields. Without such high-profit motivation to invest in advanced research & infrastructure projects, we'd still be stuck with most people working in agriculture the hard way.
Glorify employment? The socioeconomic world is as good as it is because most people are employed, doing something which contributes to maintenance and advancement of society & technology. By glorifying unemployment, you're proposing removing the efforts which maintain our socioeconomic position & direction, soon leaving us with insufficient effort to even maintain a status quo.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Alice In Wonderland
The resources of which you speak are, on the whole, perishable consumables. Remember: any society is 3 food-sparse days from violent breakdown. We have to work hard to keep things as they are, and twice as hard to get to where we want to go. Cutting workforce in half means the remaining workers must work twice as hard just to keep everyone as they are, and four times harder if any real progress is desired. Universal basic income means those not earning it are supported by those who do - reducing the incentive to work at all. You say "*it must be possible to allocate resources..." - it isn't, short of incentivising tremendous work times high risk with expectations of huge payoff.
> The socioeconomic world is as good as it is because most people are employed, doing something which contributes to maintenance and advancement of society & technology.
Can you justify this? If we use the US as an example and look at the most common jobs, we find that over 4 million people are employed as salespersons, another 3 million as cashiers, followed by 3 million people employed serving food (including fast food), etc. [1]
As the population has been moved away from agriculture, and recently manufacturing, they have become increasingly employed in the service sector. These people are not creating and advancing the technology of tomorrow, they are preforming basic tasks that could easily be done by the customers themselves (eg. automated checkouts).
What's more, there is now millions of people employed in areas such as advertising and sales, where people are essentially tasked with manufacturing wants and increasing the amount of money people spend, which not only defeats the entire basis of a functioning economic system (rational consumers making rational choices), but ensures that additional numbers of people are employed in the manufacture of superfluous goods that people are deceived into buying.
Is there any indication that if we seriously consider what is and isn't necessary in our society, the working population couldn't easily be cut by half without any kind of imminent collapse?
Sure I can justify this. You present 10,000,000 employed people working jobs which could, conceivably, be automated. Do you seriously think that given technology currently applicable, their employers would not replace those people with machines in a heartbeat if the latter were cheaper? Sure, you can hypothesize about how that should be the case, but you would overlook a multitude of realities that indeed render the human worker superior to the automated alternatives.
I dislike human-clerk checkouts at stores. Nothing against people per se, but as a high-tech introvert I'd rather do it myself - exactly as you suggest. Sure, the technology is there; heck, Walmart even has a phone-based self-scanner so you can do 95% of checkout before you even get to the self-serve register for final payment. The technology sounds great on paper and in rhetoric, but in reality it sucks (despite my valiant concerted efforts to be a automation-supporting customer). Standard self-checkout chokes on the bottle of wine ("Human clerk, is customer over 21?" Uh, yeah, I'm greying with two kids in tow, of course I'm of age). Phone-based on-the-go checkout is time consuming (stop, turn on phone (again), tap Scan, point camera, wait for slow auto-focus, wait for crappy in-store wireless connection to function, get to payment station, get selected for another 15-minute "you've been selected for a compliance check" which confuses human staff every time). Never mind shoplifting, mis-scans, and a host of other problems. Those ten million "technology replaceable staff" are still employed because they're better at the work than technology, and relieving them of their duties does NOT make their freed-up wages available for confiscation & redistribution as "living wages" to the now-unemployed former workers (it's going to technology costs and high-tech maintenance staff). That's 10M people "contributing to maintenance of society".
As for manufacturing wants and increasing money spent vs. consumers making rational choices? I'm watching a startup put serious money into marketing staff; the product is [r]evolutionary and WILL "advance society & technology", but isn't going anywhere without convincing a lot of people to buy it, and the staff IS earning their significant wages by doing so. Oh sure, there's a lot of sales of superfluous goods out there, but even that helps fill out & support an infrastructure which gets vital goods to a broad clientele: Walmart isn't going to get five pounds of bread flour on a shelf for $1.89 without the delivery system greased with the profits from the "cheap crap" they're famous for; in comparison, that same sack of flour would cost about $5 at everything-is-perfect Whole Foods.
Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
I gave an example of an automated checkout, but my point was not that the jobs I mentioned could all be automated -- my point was that they are not necessary. When I say "necessary", I don't mean that they aren't necessary to increase corporate profits (salesman, which I mentioned, certainly are), I mean they are not necessary to ensure a stable and functioning society. The example I gave with automated checkouts is not to demonstrate that automated checkouts are _better_ than human workers -- human workers are and will likely be far more capable than machines at running checkouts for a long time. My point is that they _could_ be replaced, and that if society decided that increasing human liberty was a more important goal than certain small inconveniences at the checkout, they _would_ be replaced.
So yes, these people are "contributing to the maintenance of society", but there are conceivable alternatives that would give these individuals (and society as a whole) more liberty, and would only require some small inconveniences.
The anecdote you give of your startup which needs advertising to get off the ground is beside the point. Perhaps your startup is revolutionary, and perhaps it needs some advertising to get off the ground, but this doesn't change the fact that most advertising is simply misinformation. Television commercials which make use of lush landscapes and half-naked women to sell cars don't create rational consumers, and without rational consumers you cannot have a functioning market. If advertising was simply a way in which companies communicated well-reasoned facts about products, and came with a balanced analysis of a product and its competitors, then we could argue that advertising was working towards creating a functioning market system. Until then, advertising will simply favour those with the largest advertising budgets and those who are best at disinformation, and so it's difficult to argue it is contributing to society.
> Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
This is really cheap rhetoric -- and not even accurate. If I'm arguing for a society where people are liberated from work, why are you using the Soviet Union, a dictatorship where everyone worked all the time, as some kind of counterpoint? Not everything that contradicts the status-quo is totalitarian communism, you know.
Besides, the points I'm trying to make aren't even original. There are serious proposals that have been made for why society should move to a 20-hour work week to address things ranging from rising levels of depression to climate change. [1]
Simple wrap-up: society won't move to a 20-hour work week because those who do will become jealous of those who don't, desiring unto "necessity" those things the 40- (and 60-, and 80-) hour worker can afford.
You can live on a very very small income right now. I figure an intelligent frugal life can suffice at $10/day. But you don't, because you won't give up what you don't need.
That's not life. It's just a rule that comes out of the fact that people won't care about you if you give them no benefit. It's only natural but is it right or humane?
You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others.
World average income equals the USA poverty line. That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive. Charity, yes indeed, but there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead.
The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely, not to put a gun to someone's head and demand what's not yours.
> there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead.
i dont believe this to be true (tho i'd like to see any reliable sources).
I find it more likely that a small number of people control so much "productivity" that the majority must either be "coerced" into cooperating in order to get some of the crumbs, or that they lack the basic resources to dig themselves out of the poverty hole. Its true that they aren't productive enough to support themselves, but i would imagine they would if they had the chance.
> You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others.
There are some exceptions. You don't have to work a single day in your life if:
- you inherited wealth.
- you are homeless and sustain yourself with whatever you can get without paying.
- you commit crimes and are put in prison.
- you are a woman and merry well.
- you build something as a hobby and it makes big.
> That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive.
That would be true if people were source of wealth. But source of wealth for many years now are the machines, and this wealth increased disproportionately to increase in population. If on average we are coming out of poverty at slower rate than the growth of wealth our machines produce then something is wrong.
> The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely
Almost no one gives anybody anything freely. Do you think your employer would give you anything for your work if he didn't have to?
The ones that have more have it often because they exchanged something worth less for something worth more. The ones that have less have it often because they exchange something worth more for something worth less.
Why they do it? Because exchange often is not free. Lot's of people have no choice but to exchange good that is very valuable for them and irreplaceable (such as hours of their life) for something as plain, abundant and worthless in our modern world as food.
> plain, abundant and worthless in our modern world as food.
Excuse me, but you're an idiot. (Unless your whole comment is meant as a joke.)
People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always. In the case above, you exchange hours of your life for food so that you can live another day.
Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision. Once we create such a world, great! But capitalism dictates that once this happens, the price of goods will drop tremendously. The fact that this has not yet happened tells you that this spot has not yet been reached.
> People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always. In the case above, you exchange hours of your life for food so that you can live another day.
There are some goods that have so high a value it will be worth trading almost anything for it. Eating is one, medical care is another. This fact is routinely exploited so that those not in danger of losing those highly valuable things get more out of an exchange. The execs that run McDonald's don't have to worry about acquiring food or health care, they have the class advantage to securely have those things. And yet this same company puts out a spending guide to the workers that get low wages suggesting they have 2 jobs and that they put no money towards health care or heating their apt/homes. Those low wage workers can't simply stop working there, their ability to live and eat is in direct danger from losing that work. Is that a fair exchange?
> Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision.
It doesn't matter if machines are 100% automated and don't require humans. What matters it that as machine automation gets more efficient and requires less humans to operate, the more previously employed human workers lose their ability to work and therefore their ability to eat and have shelter. And yet the ownership classes don't suffer from this advancement, they still continue to consume and funnel money and resources into themselves. Is that a fair exchange?
1) Yes, by definition. If the workers wouldn't think that they are getting more (food) than they give (time), they wouldn't work.
2) However, the question whether this is socially or even globally fair is not a question of capitalism, but of politics/government. If things continue this way, sooner or later there will be too many unemployed people and there will be a revolt/class revolution. I believe the elite will work hard to prevent it, by introducing some kind of wealth/capital tax that will redistribute wealth to the not-haves.
Your 1) assumes that workers could sustain themselves if they chose not to work. Most useful land in the world is privately owned these days - in Britain a lot of it was taken by force from the people during enclosure - and so workers can't make the choice you claim they are free to make.
> I believe the elite will work hard to prevent it, by introducing some kind of wealth/capital tax that will redistribute wealth to the not-haves.
You are an optimist then. I think more popular sentiment seem to be rather that elite will use its advantage to develop surveillance, law and prison system to detain whoever opposes them. After all they had one communist revolution to learn such things have to be actively mitigated.
You might argue that keeping poor in prison is a way of providing for them. And since less and less criminal people will go there it might some day become some sort support center for homeless/jobless.
> People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always.
Someone puts gun to your head and tells you to cut off your left hand in exchange for him not pulling the trigger. Both parties benefit from such exchange. You get the rest of your life, and he gets his amusement. Wouldn't you agree that such exchange wouldn't be exactly just and free?
Let's assume that this trade is unfair even though you might see it as benefiting both parties in some way so unfair trades exist.
One might say that it would be illegal and all legal trades are free. But if law can so perfectly tell fair trade from unfair trade then why the law changes over time? And how do we know that now the law is perfect, not like it was 100 years ago or like it will be 100 years in the future?
My comments were serious, so I guess I'm idiot, at least from your point of view.
I think you should read up on "lights out" manufacturing.
Also, you are imprecise to say that "people" are the source of wealth. If we go with your claim, labor is the source of wealth, in which case capitalism is indeed systematized exploitation and theft from the true source of all wealth: workers.
Yes, Bulkowski observed that most people are in unfulfilling jobs, and he was happy to escape that life to pursue what pleased him. He failed to note that to leave those jobs would be a terminal move because they had nothing they found fulfilling which would at the same time create livable productivity. He was lucky enough to have notable talent in doing something fulfilling to the point that someone else was willing to exchange a "living wage" for it, and he was happy as a result. I'm happy too, having found my equivalent combination of joyful productivity coupled with a satisfying fair wage for writing (iOS code instead of English prose).
Yes, we lament those who toil to unsatisfying ends. So ask each and every one of them: what do you want to do? Most answers you receive, alas, would be either "I don't know" or something not rising to the exchangeable equivalent of sustenance farming. Natural reality being that you do not get fed & clothed just for mere existence, all have a natural obligation to produce enough for themselves & dependents to survive on, and if they can't find a pleasant way to do it then they must find an unpleasant way as charity (while morally obligatory) can only go so far.
Capitalism doesn't really have much to do with it. I'm all for something like a basic income to help even out inequality and give people a safety net to fall back on, but that's still pretty much capitalism.
No one has a choice, either born in US or Western Sahara. Hard to accept, but this is reality. Only most people think they have the illusion they have, but this is false. Even Bukowski is trapped, still needs to work/money for food and to live. Yes, he does what he wants, or has the illusion as I said above.
And a big grin at the people saying we working in tech can make a difference. Creating a new social photo sharing app is not changing the world. Get real.
As a trapped life, the closest you can do to live happy is to do as much what you want (again coming back to the above) while living in the system. And yes, working in tech gives yoy higher chances to live how and where you want, but it stops there.
The only way to escape is living separate, somewhere deep down a rainforest. But then what, die from a snake bite or die from fever. Sounds better, no?
Definitely! I am a big fan myself of Kiva and charity:water. Just saying that a lot of (tech) people have different perceptions of how exactly technology can make an impact. Unfortunately the scale between charity and money driven startups is not exactly well balanced. So lets not praise ourselves too much..
Things like Kiva and charity:water do their work in the same systems as the employees of companies do, so while they do things to help others I wouldn't exactly say they are changing the world. It's more like they propagate the world they live in to others, which has its upsides and downsides.
The quote isn't "You'll regret every single thing you didn't do."
OK, so you're unlikely to regret not robbing a bank, but do you think you're any more likely to regret robbing a bank? Bear in mind that requires you to a) rob a bank and b) regret it. Sure, given a) it seems plausible you'd regret it, but it also seems exceedingly unlikely you'll actually rob a bank, even following that advice.
It's the actions that we toy with but never get around to that count, not the things that we know full-well are terrible ideas.
It's sad that most of the people I meet today can only be described as 'careerists'. I hardly see any artists or people who really enjoy what they do. And you know what your environment can do to you: it can make you or break you. Having an unhappy person next to you is a cyclic and disturbing process. The negativity percolates to unimaginable proportions. Negativity is often more affecting than positivity. That is why it is so important to 'engineer' your surroundings with care.
How many hours per day have humans worked historically compared to now? Just to survive (not starve to death). Do you think man works more now than historically? Man was cursed (after expulsion from the garden of Eden)/ or evolved (depending on your beliefs) to work, a lot.
Hunter-gatherer societies worked fewer hours and lived longer than agricultural ones & certainly worked far fewer hours than the average modern US worker.
You could regard the invention of agriculture as the curse which permanently excluded humankind from the hunter-gatherer Garden of Eden.
You know, I don't see the career ascent about forgetting my own life. I see it as a way I can do good for this world. If I have people under my span of control, I can impart what I believe to be good in this world as a part of my leadership and management style.
I also want to be a motivational speaker when I 'grow up'. I came from humble beginnings. Some people's talks have really changed my life. In order to give those talks and be invited to speak, yes you have to ascend the established social order.
Am I wasting my life by working a lot? No. The things I work so hard for have real effects in this world. My mom has been working for over 40 years of her life. If I do things right, she'll be able to retire eventually. Do I work harder than other people do for the same, or less, compensation? I'm sure I do. But you know what, you have to make the best of the situation you're in.
so this is something i don't get - why is your worklife something separated from your personal one? you spend the vast majority of your awake time working (as an adult), so why have this mindset?
once you realize that work by definition is your life, you'll take it more seriously, especially if it is harmful to you. you do not have to swallow each and every bullshit thrown at you, this is your life. you want to travel, experience other cultures? use work to reach this goal. nothing shows you other cultures like working with them directly, on the ground. lots of consulting gigs allow you to do this.
i also don't get this inherent fear that seems prevalent in US corporate culture. well, i fundamentally understand, in Europe you can't get fired on a whim, but over here in US I see this amazing mindset around CEOs and how people behave around them. Massaging emails until they definitely won't cause a ruckus, filtering, keeping silent. Why? Because CEO.
your work time is your life time. treat it as such.
coincidentally the people I have met that have understood this seem to have great careers. they go all in and are not driven by fear. my first boss called this mindset "scheiss di ned aun", viennese for "don't shit yourself". life's too short to be afraid of suits and orgcharts.
Today, too many people have jobs to support their lifestyles, not their lives. People end up working to continue making monthly payments on houses larger than they need, cars fancier than they need, and they won't be able to fully enjoy those things because they're always working 9-5. Today, we are a lot further along than we were 50 years ago. People aren't working in factories to put bread on the table, people are working in offices to pay for their next new car or big screen TV.
My goal is to make as much money as I can as fast as I can so that instead of trying to become the next billionaire, I can stop working and become the next great thinker. I value knowledge and happiness over money.
People buy things they can't afford, with money that they don't have, to impress people that they don't like
I realized I could live off of $25000/yr and maintain a modestly comfortable lifestyle at the same time. I am on track to retire before I am 40. Anyone can do it.
That's the quote I was looking for to include in my post, but couldn't find :-)
Awesome! Congrats on being on track to retire early. Just be prepared for it. From what I understand, a lot of people who retire get bored. If I didn't have to worry about money today, I would be volunteering a lot. If money was no object, I would be traveling a lot.
(You're not retiring on $25K a year in any part of Boston, NYC, Seattle, or any other reasonably vibrant urban area without making brutal compromises in terms of quality of life.)
If you like flyover states (I don't, but I'll grant that you might), Denver with even just one kid and a car--because the RTD isn't very good, and honestly for me at least that's a huge gamebreaker because I am happy to never own a car again--is going to be a pretty shitty life.
> "Denver with even just one kid and a car ... is going to be a pretty shitty life."
I'm living in Denver with one kid, a car, and less than $25k in income. And my life is awesome.
Maybe you have a different definition of "shitty" than me. Or maybe you don't realize how well you can live on that kind of money with a paid off house.
I'm pretty sure it is assumed you've paid off your house as part of this plan, and housing is by far the main distinguishing factor in cost of living between different cities. So I don't think location would matter quite as much as you're making it seem.
If we assume that the $25k is net, not gross, then I can see how it could be reasonably comfortable for one person with no rent or mortgage. You'd really want to go to a place with cheap property taxes to minimize unavoidable recurring housing costs. But anyway, you'd have roughly $2k to spend each month, which seems like it could comfortably cover utilities, food, transportation, and some entertainment, even in a non-shitty place. Keep in mind you wouldn't have to save money because you're retired--this is supposed to be solid and stable revenue for the remainder of your life (but only time will tell if that holds true).
Of course, throw in other people to support on that income, like kids, and it definitely gets tighter, but I don't think this number is at all unreasonable for a single person supporting only themselves with no debt and complete ownership of a home.
I've recently lived in reasonable comfort on less than that, but I've also learned to be suspicious about the phrase "anyone can do it" (no matter what "it" is). Sometimes it doesn't take much of a disadvantage to make certain things dramatically more difficult.
I still don't see the rosy picture you're painting.
edit: Poverty in the US is hovering at the same rate since the 60's from what I can tell, while absolute numbers obviously are rising. So.. what am I missing? Something like People aren't working in factories to put bread on the table, people are working in offices to pay for their next new car or big screen TV. just sounds nuts in the face of this:
In the later half the of twentieth century, other advanced economies in Europe and Asia began to overtake the U.S. in terms of reducing hunger among their own populations. By 2011, a survey found that among 20 economies recognized as advanced by the International Monetary Fund and for which comparative rankings for food security were available, the U.S. was joint worst. [..] In comparison to other advanced economies, the U.S. had high levels of hunger even during the first few years of the 21st century, due in part to greater inequality and relatively less spending on welfare.
Maybe I'm dealing with this?
In the 1980s and 90s, advocates of small government were largely successful in de-politicizing hunger, making it hard to launch effective efforts to address the root causes, such as changing government policy to reduce poverty among low earners.
and I can only say, if only getting rid of poverty was as easy as ignoring the poor, or downvoting a post instead of responding to it. Corporate profits are soaring, people for the most part are still struggling, and they even seem to have lost their voice. So now we're free to just dream? Why actually make progress when you can just imagine it?
I recently spent 2 months in a shipyard. IMO, working in a shipyard is comparable to working in a factory. Yes, a lot of the workers seemed poor, but they were nowhere near living in the same conditions as the poor 50 or 100 years ago. If you keep the definition of poverty a percentage, then by definition you will always have poverty. If you decide if someone is in poverty based off of living conditions, than it's gone down drastically in my opinion. My opinion is limited, to get a better one, you'll have to ask someone who's been alive for 150+ years.
I don't happen to believe the wage system is slavery (I do happen to believe we have a modern slavery system, but that's another story)
"They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work." But then why don't the slaves leave? Unlike in the past, nobody is holding a gun to their head. One possibility, probably popular among entrepreneurial types, is the slaves don't leave, because they don't think they can leave. It's a problem that is easily solved! All the boring types need is a little bit of education, for them to learn that leaving is possibility.
But maybe, what scares us a little bit, is that maybe the slaves don't want to leave. They value that security that the boring life brings them (that is why they complain "it ain't right" - because they have lost something they really valued). This is the really scary thing, because we don't want to be boring but we could see ourselves making the same choice. At the same time we don't understand the choice of the slaves to not leave, we identify with it at a level that we maybe can't explain. But is it a wrong choice? Who are we to judge others for choosing security over wealth or self-exploration? Maybe we are at a knife edge- a little bit less motivation here, a marginal preference there, a taste of failure here, and we, too, would pick security over wealth (of money, of intellect, of experience). I think that the strange paternalistic attitude of the passage is a result of the fear - the fear of that condition.
I think it's more a metaphorical "leave", as in "leave the rat race". Most people know they can leave their job, but leaving a chosen career path is a lot harder, especially for a less educated person, and particularly for blue collar workers.
What are they supposed to do? Quit without savings and try to change careers?
(That's the feeling, anyways. Not sure what the answer is.)
Well I've quit without savings (ok, with one month's savings) twice. Both times I had friends who were kind enough to help take care of me until I could find a job. I'm about to quit (with two month's savings), and there is a strong possibility I'll change careers.
It's certainly possible. I do think people generally lack the courage to try, but even that is besides my point. I think if even if people did have the courage, most would not WANT to. The don't want to leave the rat race, even though they hate it, because the security is what they crave.
Ok, you had a safety net, and it's MUCH easier if you don't have financial obligations(children, mortgages, etc..).
Most blue collar people I know can't impose on friends too much - young ones might get a couch to crash, but their friends are too poor to pay for one month of free food and transport, so some sort of savings is mandatory if you want to quit. For older ones, it's unthinkable without significant savings.
everyone, except possibly the mentally insane has a bigger safety net than they think they have. Even the homeless avoid shelters (rightfully in many cases, since many are violent places).
"everyone, except possibly the mentally insane has a bigger safety net than they think they have"
That may be so, but I guess you're from the United States, right?
To be honest, my country has several welfare programs, but they're bureaucratic and marginalizing, I think most people wouldn't like hitting rock bottom like that, and for a dubious chance at a career change - my country does have free university, but I don't think you can do it from the street, and shelter is only available in winter.
I agree you wouldn't starve, at least in the U.S. or here in Uruguay, I can think of several places I wouldn't try it out, but it would be a huge hurdle to overcome (not to mention the difficulty of getting reinserted in society).
Django unchained briefly visited that idea when Leonardo pondered why don't the slaves revolt or leave? The slave has nowhere to go.
Wage slavery, the term, was coined when industrial jobs were coming on to the scene in the north and there was still slavery in the south. Groups of laborers in these new factories soon went on protest. They self-described their situation as being similar to slave work/living standards but with a wage. Basically what we today would call inhumane.
This sentiment never diminished but instead was overwhelmed by the dominance of industrialized work in this format. Their protest fell on deaf ears because now all the jobs offered were like that and unions decided to fight for better working conditions instead of the system at large. Which leads us to today.
It's hypocritical when employees lambaste labor movements but will gladly partake the fruits of better wages and working standards.
It seem human nature will put up with a lot of things. An anthropological account i read: The anthropologist visited some area around Tibet. The system in place there required newly married women upon marriage to leave their husbands and work for the lord of the area, often as a concubine. After a year or so she would leave but not to return to her husband but instead go to a work camp where she would serve as a comfort girl. After that she returned.
The obviously shocked anthropologist asked why did people put up with this arrangement? It seems the reply was a "that's the way it was" sentiment.
well, I guess I put a bit of a teaser in there. I don't believe in the concept of wage slavery. I believe we have debt slavery. I.E. Where someone else owns your labor and enforces that ownership using the law.
This is not to say I think lending should be abolished, I just think that paying back should be voluntary, the counterparty should assume all financial risk and the borrower should assume all reputation risk.
You can easily leave, but you want to eat. You want to have a place to live, and in a nice neighborhood. You want to be transported to other places. You want to have internet access, to have TV, to have cell phone, to wear nice clothes, etc.
You can not do all of it on your own. Other people have to do it for you. But why other people would do it for you? They don't know you and have no obligations towards you and have no desire to work for you just because you're such a nice person. And even if they wanted, there's a scarcity of resources and time, why would they choose you? You have to offer them something. Like work for them in return, to do something they want but can't or won't do. Of course, you can't work for every person that participated in making your cellphone personally - that's where the money comes in.
Now when you talk about leaving - you can mean giving up all goods that our civilization gives us, sever your links with the mutual work exchange system and do it on your own. You can do that. But do you really want to? Your clothes, food and shelter would suck huge time. A simple caries may kill you. Your life would be brutal, miserable, full of pain and short (at least compared to what the civilization could give you). Is it worth it?
You can also talk about being essentially a parasite - not contributing anything and putting the surrounding people before the choice of giving you stuff for nothing or watching a disturbing picture of you slowly and painfully dying in their front porch. In our modern society, you can pretty safely bet most would choose give you something in order to avoid that. But is that really what anybody would want to be, given a choice?
You can also do worse - you can take weapons and threaten to harm your neighbors unless they work for you. If you demands are modest enough, they may choose to comply instead of creating a security layer that protects against you, since it'd be cheaper. But is it a really moral choice for anyone? If being slave is bad, how about being an enslaver?
If you have another alternative to participating in mutual work exchange system - what is it? How does it compare on outcomes and on morality?
I support and understand what he's saying, but I think too many times we set up this false choice between "pursuing our dreams" and "working for the man"
There's honor -- and authenticity -- in making choices for your life that involve working in the system.
I used to look down on those who worked jobs they hated and would say things like "That's just not for me. I don't know how you can do it." until one day somebody took me aside and pointed out what an insulting and condescending attitude I had. I was being a jerk, a well-paid, able-to-pick-what-I-want-to-do jerk. Other people did not have the same lives or face the same choices as I did. I should respect their uniqueness and decisions -- even if they loudly and publicly complained about them.
I have learned that for myself it is too easy to go off on a wild tangent about how one lifestyle is so much better than another, talking about slavery and such, just like in this letter. Basically I was being a judgmental prick, substituting my values for other people's and then declaring that my choices and values were best for everybody.
I finally realized that the quality of life is something each of us owns through our own personal choices.
That other people don't have a choice in doing that jobs they complain about doesn't mean there is "honour" in that. It's degrading to be forced into doing something you see no value in.
And what does "authenticity" even mean in this context? There is authenticity and uniqueness in the things people do despite their soul killing jobs, but what's authentic about, say, selling your body? I find this just as condescending, sorry: If those people complain, i.e. if they say it sucks for them, then it sucks for them. Talking about authenticy and uniqueness, and pretending they have much a of a choice, is respecting a strawman (i.e. decisions they never got to make), while disrespecting their actual situation.
My God, could you be any more complacent or condescending? Could you have comprehended the letter less? You are, in your own words, still being a jerk, just a self-righteous one. And no, you didn't understand a single thing he wrote.
Most people have no real choice in their work, except in the technical sense of one shitty job versus another. Most people don't "own their lives", their lives are dictated to them. To dismiss those lives as it being them having made a personal choice (the implication presumably being that they could have chosen to be a VC or a surgeon) is contemptible.
>>You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
Some people balk at the idea of "wage slavery," primarily because they think it is so different from the traditional slavery that it should not be called that.
But the question is, if you are doing something and the alternative is starvation and death, are you really a free human being? If you think about it for a while, the answer becomes clear: you are not free. Sure, you have the freedom to switch from one slave-owner to another, but at no point in the process do you have real freedom.
The difference, to me, is that the lack of freedom you describe is simply a part of the human condition (food and shelter require work, which has been true as long as life has existed) as opposed to what you call "traditional slavery" which is man-made.
So is capitalism. So is the corporate hierarchy. Heck, the society we live in right now is man-made. Why does that matter as an evaluation criteria?
Yes, food and shelter have always required work. The difference is that they have required work by the person for the person. Or by the person for their family. Or by the person for their tribe. This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.
That is a very different set up than what we have now. The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.
> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.
What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.
What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare.
The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.
i understand the sentiments, but i must point out how wrong it is to think that "subsistance" living is possible.
Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.
You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.
The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.
I hope you're not sarcastic. According to the CIA Factbook the US doesn't even make it to the top 50 countries in the world in life expectancy. And there are only 19 developed countries in the world, this makes us worse than 31 developing nations in life expectancy. Used to be number 1 in 1960s.
I'm a dual Polish/US citizen. Poland has better life expectancy according to the CIA Factbook than the US does. Poland had an average income of 240usd per year as recently as 1989. It's about $20k today. Still can provide better life expectancy than the US. Shame.
I'm a Swedish/Australian dual-citizen, and although both countries have higher costs of goods, it seems a most reasonable price to pay to have functioning public health care.
Okay, but if you define the essentials that way, not one person who ever lived before the mid-twentieth century or thereabouts was ever able to obtain the essentials for any price. (The standard of healthcare you get today by never seeing a doctor in your entire life, just taking into account the protection you get from other people having been vaccinated against the deadliest infectious diseases, is better than anything that used to be available to kings and presidents.)
So if you want a better standard of living than Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington could have dreamed of, you have to work, yes. Is that shocking or unreasonable? I doubt the men I just named would have thought so.
> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.
No. Subsistence living is entirely possible - there are millions of people doing just that somewhere in backwoods wherever, across a multitude of political systems and states, all over the world.
What you want as "subsistence living" is not its definition. What you're talking about is "how much labor cost it requires to maintain your current lifestyle in this current political system".
I guess we should expect everyone to jump on that last sentence. Whatever, I don't consider inapt idiom to destroy this position. Perhaps we should say that subsistence living is impossible when one's peers drive new cars, carry new computing equipment, and pay for their health care with insurance.
This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.
You do know that in agrarian societies this meant 12 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays ever? And that children worked in the fields instead of going to school?
People don't subsistence farm because they don't want anything more than the bare minimum for survival. They subsistence farm because the bare minimum for survival is the best they can manage.
I'm not sure if your second paragraph necessarily leads from your first one.
I have two questions for you that you should think about.
Question 1: Why is it that, as our productivity increases, we find more things to "fill up" our workday, instead of working fewer hours for the same output (which would satisfy our needs)?
Question 2: Forget about need. Do people actually want the things they are working for today? Or is it that we are socially conditioning them, from the moment they are born, that a consumption-based lifestyle is one they need to strive for?
Question 1: Because people want more than they need. This is practically an axiom. You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.
We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
>>Question 1: Because people want more than they need. This is practically an axiom.
Is it? There are several hundred million Buddhists who might disagree with you.
>>We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Your cat wants attention, affection and canned wet food because as a pet it has gotten used to those things. There are a billion felines out there that are quite happy with living alone and marking their territory and hunting for and munching on raw meat.
>>You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.
It depends. I love to go cross-country backpacking and the only things I bring with me are the bare essentials: tent, sleeping bag, food and water, clothing and some emergency supplies.
>>Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
Your argument is shifting away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you do not have to work 40+ hours a week for any of those things. You only have to do it because our capitalistic society is engineered that way.
Think about it like this: the productivity of the average worker has increased tremendously over the last century. Yet, instead of reducing work hours to account for the fact that we can produce the same amount of goods and services in less time, we have opted to work the same number of hours (or even longer in some cases) to produce more than society needs.
Even if everyone worked 20 hours a week, you could still enjoy your beer and athleticism and art and intellectual pursuits. In fact, you would have more time for them!
The Buddhists wouldn't disagree, they would agree and state that it is an axiom of their philosophy. The whole point of Buddhism is that people want more than they need and that it offers a way out.
Yes, I can easily imagine a tribesman coveting what his tribemates have. As for how exactly he acquired those things... it probably did not involve "affording" anything, because there was no currency. But I'm sure there were fights, theft, etc as well as plenty of labor invested in manufacturing more trinkets. Necklaces were not simply found on the ground; you would have needed to come up with a needle, thread, possibly a drill... all much harder to procure in the days before Home Depot!
That wasn't universally true. In northern europe winters and long nights significantly reduced the number of hours they could work. Sure, they worked extremely hard during planting and harvesting seasons, but the rest of the time not that much. Seasonal farming means that the result wasn't proportional to the work put in but rather to whether the crops got the right amount of sun and rain.
Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.
Capitalism is as man made as theory of evolution. It's been discovered. Or it's just the way the societies always worked. Most efficient. Capitalism as an ideology is just noting the fact. Not inventing, just realization of how brutally nature is and how brutally it works. Socialism is invention from the realization that capitalism is morally bad. It's exactly like vegetarians agenda: killing animals is morally wrong. Yeah, but you know what we still need to eat. It's the same way with socialism: exploiting people is morally bad. Yeah, but you know the work still needs to be done.
>Capitalism is a recent invention. Societies in the past were not capitalistic, I challenge you to find one.
They all were. Not in social sense, but in the economic one. The challenge makes no sense. What is capitalism? As long as you let the markets work and don't interfere with people decisions on the market on a permanent basis this is capitalism. As you let the capital flow and accumulate. Once you impose restrictions to it based on ideology based in distrust to free economy or marktes, you don't have true capitalism. I.e. in communism private property is banned. Actually in some instances communists were propagating the idea of moneyless society. You haven't had such an assault on the idea of making money before socialism was invented. The first person who traded results of their labor for results of labor of someone else was a capitalist. And that's how it has always worked. Actually, even imposing penalties on people for doing trade, owning property, etc. as was common in communistic states, didn't change people's behavior who still wanted to enrich themselves. Meaning we are capitalists by design, it's as natural as eating meat. Might be inconvenient morally, but the facts are facts. Smith merely discovered/noticed the phenomenon and gave it a name. So not soon later it could have been and was attacked, but as long as our DNA doesn't change we are and will be capitalistic beings.
It's a loaded term, though. Regardless of whether you believe African-Americans are still experiencing the negative effects of slavery 150 years after it was abolished.
The thing that is so particularly sinister:
A: "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the others."
B: "You're right, so we should do away with affirmative action."
C: "Exactly, it's racist since these days there are plenty of white people that are just as disadvantaged."
D: "I hereby enact this law that officially ends affirmative action."
E: "Great, now let's solve the nuanced problems of inequality across the board!"
Life cannot be sustained without effort. Does real freedom entail freedom from the demands of reality? The question I have is, whose obligation would you say it is to provide a job that you consider good enough?
In this day and age, sustaining life should not require 40+ hours of work per week.
As a society we are producing a ridiculous amount of surplus, and then conditioning ourselves to consume that surplus so that we can produce even more.
It ends in global financial collapse. Then rises again! The US will gradually fade from dominance as every other leader before it. I wouldn't be surprised if we're witnessing it's decline right now. I don't see how it gets out of the major systemic mess it is in. Detroit, Louisiana, etc. is how it begins. A first world country bit by bit reverting to third-world status.
Until some place has a successful anarchic-type revolution (a la Spain & Paris) without an outside power coming in to overthrow them we're stuck with this legacy economic/political system and the best we can do is civilize it with prudent regulation (which we can barely do because it's been systemically corrupted).
Perhaps society and its culture as a whole. Directly, it could be the community you live in or perhaps government.
Two examples:
1) I read an article where the writer took a job somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast in a non-heavily developed area. When he gets to the village he has no place to stay. How will I live?
What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot and over the next few days built him his house! It was simple but in line with the community standard. The expectation was that when someone else had a need (maybe a house) he would return the favor.
2) In the scandinavian model, I believe you get schooling paid for until you find a job and then you have to pay the gov't back. Which is sort of the reverse in NA where you pay upfront and hope to recoup the cost yourself. With that model it seems the gov't has incentive to ensure there are enough jobs so that they can recoup costs.
> What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot and over the next few days built him his house! It was simple but in line with the community standard. The expectation was that when someone else had a need (maybe a house) he would return the favor.
how is this different than borrowing money from a bank to get a house built? In the village, the westerner had a debt - sure it was verbal, but it is a debt never-the-less. This method don't work when the size of the village grows beyond a certain point (because you cannot keep track of more than about 100 people without needing written records and formalizatin).
Fast forward a few hundred years, and you end up with what we have right now - a system of money, credit and work. Its exactly the same, except with way more indirections so that the participants don't have to directly know each other and keep tabs on each other.
The difference is that (presumably) the villagers won't kick you out of the house they built for you once you become ill/disabled and thus unable to repay the debt.
Well for one thing, in my anecdotal scenario, such transactions acrue no interest. It was the kind of debt anyone could incur and payback. Money lenders aren't under any obligation to give you a loan of any size. In that village there was a self-perpetuating obligation to provide the debt.
As for how it would scale, I don't know. Is the structure and culture of western urban society the only form possible?
If literally no one did any work, then yes, we'd have trouble with this.
However, most industrial societies, things are long past the point where most people would need to work full time in order to feed and shelter their populations -- we now employ a decided minority of the labor force doing those essentials.
Apparently instead of reaping a leisure dividend, though, we've decided other things are more important. Perhaps some of them even are.
From what I've read, the hunter-gatherers still on Earth have to work about 2 hours each day. For everything.
Of course they don't have all the fancy toys. Or the worries and medications. Running away from an existence you've never really been given time to understand. Bukowski's right about how it empties you out. But unless you're lucky as him, few options have been left you. The land's all owned, and the "hunting" is long-gone.
In the end, only the market is free. Until the day you drop it and turn away.
This is true but the work that they do, they or their families will benefit 100%. "Free labor". It is honest equitable work. The system in place siphons that labor by people who control capital. Income inequality.
I agree that wage slavery exists but let's be serious, slavery in many societies, including the US was a brutal existence that included beatings & intentional separations of families, often even if you as a slave were compliant in the system. If you weren't compliant you were subject to torture and/or a violent death. The cruelty of slavery stretches far beyond the lack of freedom you're describing here.
Okay, you have an excellent point that modern slavery is a kinder, more gentle version. Now, instead of being beaten physically, you are gutted mentally via long hours and unreasonable schedules. Now, you "choose" to live away from the rest of your family because a job could earn you so much more money.
Even the punishment has become more moral and more evenly applied to all to of course avoid discrimination. You are subject to mental assault by all others and even by yourself when you do not follow the game of the wage slave. A violent death? A violent death would be a needle prick relative to the 60 years you are expected to slowly break yourself in half.
Indeed, the lack of freedom is but one facet, but honestly, while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?
I have to disagree. Strong people will pursue their passion and find their ways. Weak people will succumb and be scared. It depends entirely on the person. Most people simply prefer stability, that's all there is to it.
Not everybody has this amazing idea they are absolutely passionate about and prioritize above everything else.
I just started working in a corporate environment. I'm the best at what I do. I work beyond hours. I also have a life. I can choose to go home and have a four hour game of thrones session, or I can invest my time into personal interests and developing myself.
It's up to the individual entirely. We live in a world where we are capable of forging our own path.
There is no lack of freedom, there is simply too much of it.
> while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?
YES. You have all the resources at your fingertips. Institutions, counselling, meetups for specific interests, the INTERNET where you can communicate with anybody in a millisecond.
It's up to you what you do with these powers. Will you be complacent, or will you use them to your advantage? It's sad that most people use our new found technological superpowers to bore themselves instead of learn about our beautiful planet and all it has to offer.
The attitude that came through in your comment is exactly what I try to uphold. I say 'try', because after 21 years of complacency the discipline needed to bring this attitude into the next day has humbled me for how often I fail to do so.
I'm in the middle of making monumental changes in my life, and if I had helped ingrain a lesson or mindset into another person as much as your outlook helped me, I would've liked to know.
>But the question is, if you are doing something and the alternative is starvation and death, are you really a free human being? If you think about it for a while, the answer becomes clear: you are not free.
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with you. His idea of America was the idea that there would be many small farms where people could be more or less self-sufficient and work would have instrinsic meaning. Of course, he had actual chattel slaves to help out. Hamilton had the idea that the US would become a trading nation. By their time, the industrial-capitalist revolution had not really gotten underway world-wide but the Hamiltonians won out in the end. The notion of 'work' as we know it now had also not really come into existence. Most people in the US worked on farms or otherwise for themselves.
Lincoln agreed as well. He did not endorse wage labor for similar reasons outlined by enraged_camel. That man was no dummy concerning slavery.
Lincoln advocated 'free labor' as the moral and honest form of labor. Which took as a given that labor is greater than capital. Its proceeds should benefit completely its worker and his family not siphoned by the few who have capital.
Industrialization has made the workplace of the farm or workshop obsolete but I believe the principle could be maintained if workplaces were employee owned and managed democratically rather than authoritatively.
Yes but that definition makes the word so useless to include the vast majority of people that have ever lived through all of history.
It also an attempt to bring a lot of connotations which simply aren't true. People don't use the word because they want to explain something the reader doesn't already know, they want to make the connotations that come with the word.
I'm not sure the alternative is any better as a startup founder/employee. You're putting in greater amounts of hours, blood, sweat, and tears for less money in a lot of cases. Sometimes it pays off, oftentimes it doesn't. Bear in mind I speak as a corporate wage-slave whose company just announced layoffs after a "record quarter". The answer must be to win the lottery, maybe I should start playing...
I've been at my current full-time job a bit over a year. The previous six years were a mix of freelance, contract, and startup work -- sometimes full-time, sometimes way-more-than-full-time, and sometimes not at all... but usually part-time.
There are some things I like about the current job, and if I stick around at least another six months, I'll likely play a key role in overhauling the front end of a major automaker's website using state-of-the art. Not a bad feather to stick in a cap.
On the other hand, the chances that I'll do anything else in the meanwhile seem pretty slim. I notice in the last year alone, my energy for original/personal projects is diminished, I feel less creative/thoughtful in general -- and arguably even less interesting than during the aforementioned freelance period. I do feel, as Bukowski put it, somewhat emptied out by my work.
It's possible what I really need is a different full-time gig, since I have been in some full-time situations that felt energizing. But I'm starting to be convinced that when I'm hiring myself out part-time, I stay more personally grounded and sharper as far as my general skills and strength in the field goes.
Unfortunately, steady skilled part-time employment seems to be considerably more difficult to find than full-time.
i sold my startup about 3 months ago, and immediately starting looking for another job. after a couple months, a couple interesting but-not-exciting offers, and one interview process that ended in me not getting an offer, i finally took a worthy vacation. while on a boat in the caribbean, a couple things occurred to me: (1) i really don't need to work for the next ~10 years (2) in that time, i will likely stumble on another opportunity similar to the previous one, which has afforded me this financial freedom (3) i am way more interested in learning, exploring, and art than a "real" job, even a job like my previous one, that i particularly enjoyed. (4) i am very fortunate to be in this position, and i really don't want to waste it.
so i've been giving this topic some serious thought. to work or not to work? that is the question.
Well, based on my experience you definitely want to 'work', but work on things that fulfill you in some way. Hopefully your startup sale allows you to never again be dependent on the The Man, so if you're tasked with something onerous and/or stupid, you can simply walk away.
I am currently taking a sabbatical of sorts after slaving away and saving up for 5 years. I threw most of my savings into index funds, and then set up automatic withdrawals to my savings account. This forces me to try and live within a certain budget. If all goes well (i.e. market stays healthy), I will have only spent down a small amount of my savings by the time I return to the labor force. In the mean time, I have been taking some coursera classes, toying with some side projects, and doing some R&R. I highly recommend it for people who can afford to do this.
How much savings did you have? I'm considering doing the same at some point, though my quick glance at index funds makes it seem like I'd get basically nothing. What sort of budget does this afford you?
Same with me as well, I am doing some work in Forex, but that is proving incredibly difficult. As that is live intraday training.
I usually work a contract job for my University but I get my money in lump sums, so I was thinking I could put a sum into some sort of index fund, or even a currency fund.
Vangaurd low cost index funds. Supposedly, you can count on 8-10% annual return. I also did/do some occasional stock picking which has gotten good results (but I wouldn't count on that being sustainable). I probably spend about 20k a year, and have savings in the low 6 digits.
I waited until I had 5-10x my annual expenses, but obviously you can do it with less. My main recommendation would to be have at least an extra 6 months of living expenses beyond what you need (so if you are taking a year off, have at least 1.5 yrs of living expenses) in case it takes a while to find work again. The main advantage of saving more than that is you can use the returns from your investments to offset some of your costs a bit.
You can also count on index funds to lose 50% of their value in two years in an upcoming crisis. The roaring 90s and mid 2000s isn't a pattern that will continue to repeat itself. The fed can't keep printing the S&P500 up forever.
I think made a great decision, but you ought to diversify your nest egg.
I agree that there is some risk, but I am not sure how I would be able to diversify any more than I already have. I have my money split into about 6 different index funds, primarily diversified globally, although I have a few industry/sector specific funds. And then I have about 30% of my savings in stocks that I picked, most of which are pretty stable companies with fairly long term future/outlook (so they would, in theory, come out of a recession in good shape, even if they took a few hits).
If there is some other asset class I am missing, let me know. In the meantime, I think I will take my chances with the market. Worst case, if things get bad, I can just go back to work (left my old company, in a fairly recession proof industry, on good terms)
My experience is that reaching a 'work-optional' state is not the easy transition most would think it. I recommend that you search for a meaningful goal and get to work on it, drifting is dangerous.
"A man can never drink his fill by waiting in line for the tap"
That quote motivates me everyday, because it reminds me that the things I want in life will never be achieved by working at a place in any capacity where the choice of my continued employment lies in the hands of any one person.
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
I do love my job, though there is so much more I want to do with my life - so much more I could do that (as far as I can tell) would really help humanity. Unfortunately I'm locked into working because of student loans and overall cost of living. I try to do work in my free time but sadly 3 hours a night does not build a company with enough revenue to grant me freedom.
By the time I've earned enough from my job to afford not having a job I worry I'll have moved on to a different life stage where kids will take up my evenings.
I know I'm not the only talented, driven 20-something in this situation and with student loans recently so high, it is a pity to think that overall out generation will have fewer who are able to make their ideas real because of it. Thanks to YC for offsetting that effect and helping us believe we can "get free".
Unfortunately, the modern day tech incubator model serves a very narrow audience with a very limiting set of criteria (e.g. billion dollar markets). There are lots of other people like the gentlemen referenced in the article that simply want to build a self-sustaining income stream. Crowdsourcing is helping to fill that vacuum at least partially; but I think more can be done in this arena to help people escape the awful "Office Space"-like dronework that, unfortunately, is still the norm today.
This goes off the tracks for me about midway through. While for many people the reality described is actually their life, there are many of us (and I'd imagine a huge percentage of those reading this) that aren't slaves. If you're making over 70-80k/year, you have the capacity to save a lot and do the things you want to do before you hit 55, 65, or 75.
Employment is, by definition, exploitation. If the objective of the company is to profit, it has to pay the employee less than the value he generates. The alternative is profiting out of non-internalized costs (e.g., exploiting natural resources).
there are other forms of organization out there - a non-profit, "cooperative" organization could and should be the norm. This form of organization means that everyone in the org is an owner, and is paid according to the work they do. There is no fat cat at the top that don't do work but takes in money. I believe in brazil there is a manufacturing company that is like this - each worker gets a slice of the profit.
Here in Uruguay, we have lots of "cooperatives" (our country has a long socialist story), most work out well, but they come across many of the same problems that faced the old Soviet Union, and you do get "fat cats" at the top regardless of the supposed equality system.
- Healthcare cooperatives, which serve most of the population ("Mutualistas", based on Mutualism)
- An Insurance cooperative
- Credit Union cooperatives
- Housing cooperatives (those are the ones that worked out for the worst)
In many cases, they compete with non-cooperatives.
Edit: while they should be equal, even if they get same or slightly better pay, cooperative directors have lots of actual power, which can be turned to money if they so desire (kickbacks, etc...)
Not really. Employment is a trade of resources like any other. According to what you say, the employee is "exploiting" the employer as well, because he is trading his time and effort (which he values less) for money (which he values more). The trade works because both sides have opposite notions of value in the two things (time/effort vs wages).
Besides, the value an employee generates does not come from the employee himself (if it did, he could do the same task outside of a company and earn money). His effort is channeled through several other resources, including the efforts of other employees, capital and machinery, all of which was acquired and managed by the company. The company profits because the overall value generated by this system is larger than the sum of the value generated by any individual part. This isn't exploitation "by definition".
Can I just say that I love Charles Bukowski? If you've never read him go buy his books now. There's so much humanity in there. Some will think he's a downer or depressing, but I think he's genius. His life reminds me of this quote by Hokusai:
When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.
Run With the Hunted and Love is a Dog from Hell spring to mind, but for me half the fun of reading him is just jumping in randomly. His life was chaos so it's fitting. If you read enough about "Hank" a picture of who he was will start to materialize.
Since he's dead and not able to spend your book sales money on booze and horses, he'd probably be ok with you just reading his stuff online for free[0]. He is also great to listen to, there are a lot of recordings of his readings that you can find in the usual places. The poems are filled with a kind of beautiful carnage which contrasts the even tone of his delivery. Like, "Yeah, that crazy shit happened but so what?"
One of my favorites as a teaser to start with:
Rain
a symphony orchestra.
there is a thunderstorm,
they are playing a Wagner overture
and the people leave their seats under the trees
and run inside to the pavilion
the women giggling, the men pretending calm,
wet cigarettes being thrown away,
Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the
pavilion. the birds even come in from the trees
and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian
Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,
one man sits alone in the rain
listening. the audience notices him. they turn
and look. the orchestra goes about its
business. the man sits in the night in the rain,
listening. there is something wrong with him,
isn't there?
he came to hear the
music.
p.s. I can't speak for the quality of that site, you may have better luck elsewhere. When I looked up Rain all I got was the first line, so it's possible that other poems have errors.
Women was an excellent book. A complicated book that works on many subtle levels. On one level, it is in essence, the T.V. series Californication. On another level, it is the story of a man finding himself through his partners. Ham on Rye was also another excellent story of Bukowski's origins. All of his books were part memoirs, now. Post Office, tracks his early years working in the Post Office. Day in, day out. Checking in, his life being eaten away. The prose isn't great. However, it is rather amusing to read it today. Especially in a city where you hear people working 90 hour weeks; 90 hour weeks in tiny red-bull fueled offices. For what, for someone's glory.
I'd also like to recommend Bukowski Tavern in Inman Square, Cambridge, MA. They have Bukowski's writings all of the walls and are generally a good place to get a beer. There's a second location in Boston, but I haven't been to that one:
http://bukowskitavern.net/
What is it that you find offensive? The part that he was a drunk? The part that he kicked another human being? The part that he kicked a woman? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked women? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked a man?
Side opinion: If you consume content only by people who are perfect (which really means follow your ethical system, your values), your content sources are going to be incredibly narrow. Also, because I have to make it crystal clear. I am not advocating kicking anyone. I just think that him committing something that I disagree with doesn't necessarily mean that his ideas aren't worth thinking about.
> What is it that you find offensive? The part that he was a drunk? The part that he kicked another human being? The part that he kicked a woman? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked women? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked a man?
Are your questions anything other than pointlessly flippant?
Fiance: I am and will continue to sleep with other men.
Bukowski: You fing w*re [kicks].
Relationships are hard. While I don't agree with physical or verbal abuse, I think in this case Fiance probably hurt Bukowski more with her words than he did with his kick. It certainly didn't seem like he was kicking her because he "thought it was funny to kick women".
No, just there are people who understand why physical abuse and violence is not tolerable in _any_ situation, especially not against the weak. People who equate physical and verbal violence (by verbal violence I mean anything not physical) either have no idea what they're talking about or they're mentally ill.
I agree, physical and verbal violence should not be equated. But not because verbal violence is clearly less damaging than physical violence. It's complicated, and subjective and different for everyone.
I'm totally against _any_ type of violence. But I've met and studied enough people who carry around a lifetime of mental illnesses caused verbal violence (esp. at a young age) to be able to say that one is worse than the other.
Yes, and those people are the same folks who give women who are violent or abusive to men a free pass, as women can't be violent against men as men are so much stronger than women.
> While I don't agree with physical or verbal abuse, I think in this case Fiance probably hurt Bukowski more with her words than he did with his kick.
So you do agree with physical abuse. According to you, if your partner says something that upsets you, its totally OK to hit them. That is domestic abuse 101.
> So you do agree with physical abuse. According to you, if your partner says something that upsets you, its totally OK to hit them. That is domestic abuse 101.
That's absurd. Where did I say "if your partner says something that upsets you, it's totally OK to hit them"?
I stated that:
a) Bukowski's fiance probably hurt Bukowski (by stating that she cheats on him) more than he did by kicking her.
b) It didn't seem like his reasons for kicking her were because he "thought it was funny to kick women."
Please read more carefully before you troll me, sir.
> a) Bukowski's fiance probably hurt Bukowski (by stating that she cheats on him) more than he did by kicking her.
Why would that be relevant whatsoever to why someone kicks their partner? You said you don't agree with abuse as a preface and then immediately put physical abuse on the level with having your feelings hurt by something someone said.
I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been, but these kinds of statements happen all the time as a way to create a justification for the abuse inflicted on someone. It's not only abusers that do this, but people that are friends and acquaintances of both the abuser and abused.
It may well be that someone has a reasonable expectation of monogamy, but that's entirely irrelevant. If you don't like the way your partner acts in a relationship, you don't hit them, you talk about it and possibly break it off.
Whether or not monogamy is a gift or an entitlement depends entirely on your culture / value system. I think that abusing someone's trust is, well, abusive.
> Why would that be relevant whatsoever to why someone kicks their partner? You said you don't agree with abuse as a preface and then immediately put physical abuse on the level with having your feelings hurt by something someone said.
1. I stated that I don't agree with abuse (physical or emotional).
2. I stated that in this case I thought the emotional abuse Bukowski's fiance inflicted on Bukowski was worse than the physical abuse he inflicted on her. That's my opinion. I think the way that she casually taunted him with her infidelity is _serious_ abuse. The kick is also terribly abusive.
I don't know all the facts, only what I saw in the video. I don't know if Bukowski went on to be a serial abuser or not, but that's not relevant to what happened in the video, which is the subject of this discussion.
You say: "I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been" - the answer is yes. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on by someone you're in love with.
> 2. I stated that in this case I thought the emotional abuse Bukowski's fiance inflicted on Bukowski was worse than the physical abuse he inflicted on her. That's my opinion. I think the way that she casually taunted him with her infidelity is _serious_ abuse. The kick is also terribly abusive.
How exactly is being honest about not wanting and not committing to a monogamous relationship on an equal playing field as getting hit? Moreover, even if you considered that verbally and/or emotionally abusive, that in no way justifies hitting someone.
> I don't know if Bukowski went on to be a serial abuser or not, but that's not relevant to what happened in the video, which is the subject of this discussion.
If Bukowski was a serial abuser, it is most certainly 100% relevant to the video in question. Domestic abuse isn't about a single incident, its about a continuum of behavior and events.
> You say: "I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been" - the answer is yes. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on by someone you're in love with.
I have, but hitting someone and being cheated on are not even remotely on the same playing field. In fact, it is a common tactic for abusers to accuse or blame partners for the abuse by insinuating or referring to actual past instances of cheating.
> "but hitting someone and being cheated on are not even remotely on the same playing field"
Hey man, I think we've covered some interesting ground here, but I think we just have to agree to disagree. I certainly don't think that cheating should be punished with physical abuse. However, I do think that the cheating on someone who you're engaged to and clearly expects monogamy is worse than hitting someone once. I just do.
Also, let's not forget that, whilst unacceptable, the kick was solicited by her admission of infidelity, whereas the infidelity is seemingly unsolicited.
> I certainly don't think that cheating should be punished with physical abuse. However, I do think that the cheating on someone who you're engaged to and clearly expects monogamy is worse than hitting someone once. I just do.
Cheating on someone is a violation of that person's trust. Hitting your partner is violation of their physical integrity.
> Also, let's not forget that, whilst unacceptable, the kick was solicited by her admission of infidelity, whereas the infidelity is seemingly unsolicited.
What is the point of making this statement if not to excuse her getting hit or to make her getting hit seem like "she was asking for it"?
I agree that it was abusive of Bukowski to kick her. 100%. That's doesn't mean that he kicked her because, "he thought it was funny to kick women". I think it's clear from the video that he kicked her because he was upset that she was cheating on him. I think he was entitled to be upset, but not entitled to kick her.
And then somebody reduces the man to this awful youtube clip where he's drunk and fighting with his fiancé, where he kicks her meanly from across the couch, several times.
And I have to remember: that's just this thread, this thread will pass. It's Friday. I'm in a decent mood. Let's find something to eat, start thinking about what I will work on today.
But this crap still bothers me. It drags an otherwise nice discussion about good art into the gutter of reactionary judgements. A lot of really good artists had/have problems, but that doesn't discount their work.
Every argument is ad hominem nowadays. It is the sickness of the post-modern era[1]. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. Charles Bukowski kicked a woman. Paula Dean once used a racial slur referring to a man that robbed her at gunpoint. Leonidas probably opposed women in the military.
Let's throw out all of human history and art and listen to the pious, sniveling PC morons of the last 10 years. That is the modern world for ya.
Thomas Jefferson said that [some well reasoned argument or opinion]
Yeah, but Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.
[and thus we shouldn't consider his argument]
I've only read one, but it was quite unlike anything I'd read before - old guy, depressing grind of a job, alcohol and rough women - but a rawness and authenticity that you don't often get. At the time I was very interested to learn that he was effectively writing of the life he'd lead.
There's a whole stack of comment below on judging him-as-a-person - but if you read widely you'll be well aware that many books are worth reading despite the character flaws of their authors.
He seems to speak of the supervisor of the packers as someone who is above the working life, but the fact is that he is trapped for life as well, he just happens to be trapped one sport higher on a very long ladder.
I figure this being trapped is a sentiment a lot of people share, although I know of a significant minority of people who enjoy their jobs and lives, even after 30 years of "paycheck slavery".
The whole story reminds me of the song Factory by Bruce Springsteen.
476 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] thread[1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100%24+from+1969
Using the gold example- suppose industrial demand for gold to fuel the semiconductor industry tripled the price of gold compared to 1969. Now suppose the price of milk, bread, gasoline, electricity, water, clothing, and alcohol only doubled in price compared to 1969. If inflation is a measure of your purchasing power IN GENERAL (not your purchasing power of gold), inflation was roughly 200%, no?
If gold had absolutely no practical value by itself, it would be free of market demands like that in my example. But of course then its value would have no connection to purchasing power, and we're right back where we started.
A lot of other tangible assets were dramatically cheaper in 1969.
An ounce of gold is traditionally viewed as a months wages. And it hasn't changed much but there are some fluctuations.
Interest rates and inflation are artificial constructs that are fiddled with to screw you out of your money.
That's substantially different from the CPI-based value. I wasn't quite expecting that.
Also, imports have helped to keep inflation low. The Big Mac cannot be imported. Thus, you would expect it to show a higher rate of increase than overall prices.
Source:
[1] http://www.mcdepk.com/piratesofthecaribbean/mediadocs/big_ma...
That's not manipulation. That's just trying to calculate an accurate number.
If you do no substitutions, then you will end up being a Collectible Goods Index, rather than a Consumer Goods Index. It makes no sense to calculate inflation in 2013 based on a basket of goods from 1919.
But that creates another problem. If you do no hedonic adjustments, then you will overstate inflation if consumers move upmarket. It's not the prices that went up -- it's consumer purchasing habits.
Stated differently: there is more to life than buying gold.
Data General NOVA: 1969 $8000 2013 ~$0
$100 * ($0 / $8000) = $0
I first tried this exercise with oil instead of gold, but the price change over the period in question is nearly identical. I doubt it means anything, but I thought it was interesting.
ok how about this. How about you do a deal and pump as much oil as possible as long as you can exchange it for something real. and you have a long time cultural affilation for a yellow shiny metal. yeah that will do. How about we do a deal. We keep the oil pumping as long as we can exchange a ratio of oil barrels for this shiny metal. When the oil runs out in a hundred years or so we will have a stack of shiny metal to trade back.
More reading at this blog: http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/call-of-century.html
Second, it's incredibly hard to accurately measure such a nebulous concept as inflation (because there's no such thing as a "general price level"), but it's pretty bold to definitively state that the CPI understates inflation. Measuring inflation is hard. We can buy an iPhone 5 for half what we paid for the first one in 2007--how do we quantify that price change in the CPI? Does a 2013 vehicle that costs the same as its 1995 counterpart represent high or low inflation? It's not just prices that change--quality changes and spending behavior changes. And then we have to take the wildly changing behavior of 300 million consumers, buying god knows how many products, and consolidate that into a single number.
Then that single number has to stand up to those same 300 million people, each of whom is biased by 4 billion years of evolution to be loss averse, to notice bad changes and grow accustomed to good changes, and, inevitably, lots of them will point to things that are much more expensive, unconsciously blind to all the things that have gotten cheaper, and claim that the CPI understates inflation.
[1] http://stats.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm#Question_7
[I tried pretty hard myself and all I came up with was, possibly, clothing].
I don't think I ever have to change the oil in my car over the duration of my lease. Synthetic lubricants, tighter tolerances, and better seals are amazing.
Plus, at what other time could you get a 400+ hp car that can get 26+ mpg? The safety features are insane. The wipers and lights come on automatically and the car buzzes (or so I am told) if I drowse off behind the wheel. I can listen to punk rock in the middle of Wyoming, but I won't have to because my car will plot a route around it.
Clothing has gotten much better for less, but that's largely global supply chain. I checked into a hotel in China and my room had a pair of throwaway trainers for walking in the city.
I can safely fly between any points in Europe with the change left over from a beer.
I can walk into an optometrist and get a box of contact lenses for my astigmatic eyes and wear a clean, new pair every day, all for less than hard lenses cost decades ago and for which I would have to wait weeks with multiple fittings. And they still sucked, especially in a windstorm.
Bicycles that would be insanely futuristic when I was a kid, with disc brakes, aluminum frames, and more gears than I need, cost the same as my hunk-of-steel Schwinn.
Bread! Coffee! They are so good now!
Best of all, my toilet cleans me.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/03/11/ny-feds...
Quite the opposite, in fact.
The US government has traditionally overreported inflation, because the CPI was not hedonically-adjusted until the year 2000.
The Billion Prices Project at MIT provides an independent measure of inflation, and it tracks the CPI quite well. (Note, though that Billion Prices uses a different basket that does not include services. Thus, it will not match exactly.)
What is the point of existence if we never get around to experiencing it?
"It's not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed, it is the things we do not." - Randy Pausch
Same for startups ;-)
A Scandinavian psychologist somewhat recently proposed a typically Scandinavian reversal of this: he suggested people should work to age 80, but work proportionally less in all the years up to there. Basically redirect the pension system to subsidize more early-age vacation and less pension.
edit: http://cphpost.dk/business/researcher-advocates-25-hour-work...
Consulting was a critical step. This approach would be hard to pull off in most regular jobs.
It doesn't have to be the same job, or to be gap-free, though. If you have a strong retraining/welfare system to cover the gaps, as Denmark has, it's not as big a deal if someone needs to take a year or two off to change jobs. If you can't do your job anymore at some point for health reasons, there is a generous system for disability leave. And, a common unemployment insurance system (a-kasse) covers being unemployed for up to two years, with up to ~$36k/yr salary and retraining / job-finding assistance. As a last resort, there's a floor of ~$22k/yr welfare that anyone can get if they have no other source of income, with no time limits. That's comparable to the low end of U.S. Social Security, so at least nobody would really end up with no income.
The wager is that enough people would be productive post-65 to have a significant overall effect.
It would be an interesting question given most of the aged people change their job. Then those categories of jobs would probably be overrun by aged people seeking those jobs, and hence poor wages and rampant unemployment.
At 70, your body is generally not able to do the same things you were doing at 20/30, at least not with the same ease. A 75 year old man could work as hard as a 25 year old man, but the same amount of work will probably take a greater toll on his health.
In a way, seems like his scheme is pretty much geared to make people dread reaching old age, and a reduction in pension payments would come from all the people committing suicide after facing the realization that as their bodies become more tired and less resilient, they will have to work harder.
Note that this proposal is also in the context of a system that provides full support for job retraining and unemployment pay in the gaps (and a good disability and mental-health system), so if you run into serious problems you have options.
Maybe wanting to stop working at 65 and step into full retirement is particular to the American system. Most 70 year olds I know would like some kind of job/retirement hybrid: work 30 hours a week, have longer vacation times, more flexible hours, not losing the job when you have to take a leave for medical reasons, etc.
My father is almost 70, and going on hikes with him leaves me pretty winded. Certainly no walk in the park. I'm just a little more than one third of his age. If he would do some strength training in addition to his jogs and hikes, I imagine he would be in great overall shape.
I don't think that I'll necessarily be anywhere near his physical fitness when that time comes. But with retirement or a decreased workload, I intend to dedicate more time to keeping fit and treating my body as more of a temple.
With societies obsession over youth these days, it's gonna be interesting to see how the youth of today hold up in forty to fifty years.
And this exact kind of thinking is what the societal overlords want you to subscribe to. Give them the best years of your life to get a degree of freedom later in your life, when the freedom won't matter anymore anyway, cause you'll be pissing in your diapers and be limited to a very small subset of things a healthy young person can do.
I see it this way: when you're retired and old, the overall potential of what you can do with your life is much lower than that of when you were in your 20s and 30s. Why is that? Because an old person with the same amount of time and money can do much less with those resources than a young person.
When you live your life like a run off the mill robot, living your life according to a set of societal expectations and rules set by other people, what's the point of such a life anyway?
PS. OP, I wasn't addressing you, in case you feel I've attacked your point, I am just furthering it :)
"I IPO'd for ten million dollars! Life is awesome!" quickly transitions to "Frank IPO'd for 5x what I did! That's not fair!"
It is not healthy to constantly compare yourself with people who are worse off. Sure, it induces a sense of gratitude to know that you have clean drinking water and no threat of being killed by a warlord today (unlike many people in Africa, for instance), however if we settled for that, there would never be any incentive to improve our situation further. Imagine what would've happened if every inventor and scientist in the history of mankind had that attitude.
Also, not everyone on this board lives in Silicon Valley and works for a startup that spoils him stupid with catered lunches, scheduled massages and a 150K/yr salary. A lot of us are just normal middle class people living in economies that aren't that prosperous and the prospect of losing a job can really threaten our financial security. Also, if you work for a shit company that takes advantage of that, you can be in for a pretty miserable experience. So get off your high horse already.
I never thought "keeping up with the Joneses" is part of my human nature. Or even my culture.
The 'societal overlords' from previous posts you have now ascribed to human nature (??) are really 'society', perhaps influenced by some ultra-elite cadre, sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses
You just can't believe it because you believe in a magical hierarchy with the free ones on top -- but so do the ones way up there. My god, if you're even able to leave a comment, you're already better off than 99% of people alive today!
The "rat race" is a subjective, elective construct and, by definition you cannot escape it a long as you subscribe to it. The people you think have escaped it, or control it, are also trappe by it, no matter how hard that is for you to believe. The only ones who have truly escaped are the ones who have had a fundamental shift in the way they conceptualize work, career, goals, desires and everything.
[1] They're only victims if they go too far, trigger civil unrest, and wind up on the losing side of the guillotine.
"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's" -William Blake
We haven't yet found a way to fairly spread privilege in our societies, so we're stuck with the least worst system, but I would note that globalisation has actually raised living standards in many countries from India to China, in spite of, or perhaps because of its deleterious effects. People always want to hoard wealth (almost everyone does this, even those at the bottom), and it's hard to change that. It remains to be seen whether we can effectively temper human desires and spread that wealth and not end up in dystopia, but please don't try to blame things on a secret elite directing a carefully created system - it's a mirage and is not helpful. There are many contending forces vying for prominence in our societies, and in many ways corporations are more powerful than people or politicians (NB a corporation is not a CEO, it is a composite body).
The guillotine you mention was actually far worse for the ordinary people of France than for the aristocracy (many of whom simply fled) - terror and denunciation was used as a weapon on moderate politicians and everyday citizens, and even eventually the chief proponent of its use.
Aside: I wonder what effect increased lifespans will have on hoarding. We know the old horde, will they horde even more?
There have been, historically and presently, power and wealth grabs by the already powerful, and manipulation of political and social structures to suit their needs. To some extent this was easier historically, partly because there were fewer laws, but even now, with the legacy of hundreds of years of social and political reform, and a lot of it intended to liberate common people, there are still large distortions in our political systems that significantly mis-allocate power to the already powerful.
I would also take some umbrage with your statement that we "haven't yet found a way to fairly spread privilege in our societies" and your defence of the "least worst system" meme. Whilst there are aspects of the Western socio-political setup that are designed around the (reasonably) fair distribution of wealth, there remains constant pressure against legislation designed to develop the rights of common people in society. Indeed, those interested in reducing those rights are often able to gain popular support for their cause by positioning themselves as defenders of the wealth and power of those people whose wealth has recently increased - i.e. the middle classes, which now form a very significant political power base.
We do know of ways of more fairly distributing the rewards of labour (cooperatives come to mind, as a single example), but they are unpopular in a lot of the West, and if you look back to history you will see that that mentality was actively created to counter threats to vested interests. Ironically the system of laissez-faire capitalism that was adopted to counter these more de-centralised power structures ended up diluting the power base of the "old money" (and was eventually massively scaled back), though it persisted the fundamental inequality in wealth distribution.
I would, however, fully agree with your assertion that these problems are not (or at least very unlikely to be) the result of a direct conspiracy by some elite group. I don't think history supports that view, and I don't believe people are particularly capable of maintaining such a conspiracy for so long a period of time. It should be clear, however, that the "conspiracy" could itself be an emergent part of the system - a higher order structure that has managed to persist itself (thus far) without continuous direct human intervention, however that would make it not a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word.
N.B. This is obviously a pretty broad sweep based on my interpretation of history - if anyone has any corrections or comments I'd appreciate hearing them.
Sure. But that does not conflict with "emergent structure": There's no need for a cabal at the top consciously arranging the structure of society. Just a bunch of people who are often trying to manipulate things in specific directions, and where a lot of them will have overlapping motivations. From the outside, that can look very much the same.
A lot of the time people are not necessarily even trying to steer things a certain way, but merely looking after their own interests.
E.g. a central idea in marxism is that the capitalist is not really at fault: He's "caught up" in the system just as much as the worker. He is exploiting people working for him, but he does not necessarily intentionally want to oppress. He is merely playing his role, protecting what he sees as his own interests, just like the workers.
And so you get "nice" capitalists, who try to do better, but they can still largely only act within the confines of their role: The only way the capitalist can top oppressing, is by ceasing to be a capitalist. But that is not in his interest, and it is unreasonable to expect the capitalist to willingly do so - he will find every excuse for not giving up his privilege (and many might be good; e.g. it is perfectly possible an individual capitalist might be doing more net good with his profit than it would have if he shared everything equally with his workers). Ultimately, marxism is cynical about human nature: We are all looking out for our own interests; to the extent we do not, it is because we lack awareness of our real interests or position.
Further: "I don't think history supports that view, and I don't believe people are particularly capable of maintaining such a conspiracy for so long a period of time. It should be clear, however, that the "conspiracy" could itself be an emergent part of the system - a higher order structure that has managed to persist itself (thus far) without continuous direct human intervention, however that would make it not a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word."
I will also reiterate that just because there isn't a genuine conspiracy does not mean, as some (not you, here) conclude, that "the system" is as good as uncorrupted and can't be improved.
I'm not enough of a scholar of Marxism to disagree with your reading of it, but for my own part I would say that people are (obviously in my view) capable of acting in more than their own self interest, unless one insists on almost ridiculous contortions of their motives. This capability for action in the wider good can and should be harnessed by society, and my preference would be for this to take place in step with a broader decentralisation of power (and wealth).
Finally, I think a tiresome strand to this debate (not brought by you) is the idea that any kind of social improvement inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism. I know this view is a little passé, but I really see this as part of a set of propaganda disseminated by the powerful intended to counter challenges to their power. This certainly has historical precedent, and it is pretty clear that similar things happen today, often through support to favourable political parties, which comes with an influence over those parties' message. Of course, lots of other people buy into the propaganda, because it also serves their own (much smaller) interests.
I didn't claim our current system is perfect or uncorrupted (the phrase least worst system clearly points out that our current systems are flawed). I don't think social improvement (however you define that) inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism, but I do think people claiming to have all the answers to creating a fairer society have turned out to be tyrannical more often than not (e.g. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin etc), and I prefer the gradual, consensual move to socialism we have in Western Europe (a form of capitalism tempered by social justice and redistribution, far more equitable than in Marx's time for example). Blaming, dehumanising and scapegoating minority groups (the 1%, bankers, etc) to expiate our sins does nothing to help our society become more fair, quite the reverse.
The last century under moderated capitalism has seen much progress in conditions of work in the western world, and even recently in the developing world, and this in spite of the selfishness inherent in capitalism which you would think would tend to ever-increasing centralisation of power and wealth if left unchecked - I find that an interesting contradiction.
If people want to debate redistribution, what fair means, how to moderate capitalism or replace it and how to make our societies more fair that's (in my view) a useful debate, but diatribes about a shadowy conspiracy of a 1% elite spanning centuries are not productive, because they're not going to make people face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and their relations with others in society.
I wasn't referring to you when I indicated that some conclude that the system is "as good as uncorrupted and can't be improved", nor was I suggesting that you subscribe to "the idea that any kind of social improvement inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism". In both cases I was speaking about the opinions I encounter in this debate more generally.
As to the point you make in your second paragraph; it strikes me that the improvement in living standards is more to do with improvements in technology and political freedom than it is to do with the way our economy is organised. The idea that we owe these improvements to the economic structure is, however, prevalent; sometimes the idea is modified to say that the technological advancement we have enjoyed would have been impossible without the economic system we have.
Both forms of this idea fail to recognise that there have been numerous burst of technological and social advancement that haven't relied upon capitalism (e.g. the Romans, but also basically every civilisation in history), unless of course you broaden the definition of capitalism so much to include almost any commercial system, and both fail to offer evidence that capitalism was causal of, rather than merely temporally correlated with, the improvements in living standards. The negative evidence available, about systems which have historically been anti-correlated with progress (like the ones you mentioned), only covers a narrow range of possibilities, and are difficult to generalise from.
I should note that I'm strongly inclined to believe that there was a causal link between capitalism and the success of the industrial revolution and the things that followed (i.e. it was sufficient), but I am far less convinced that the form of capitalism used, which strongly concentrated power, was necessary, and I think that it is deleterious to broader society.
I, like you, "prefer the gradual, consensual move to socialism we have in Western Europe". This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly, and I find these ideas of conspiracy very boring, but I'm still wary of the notion that we should pretend that no one has an interest in concentrating power and wealth, and maintain the status quo. My reading of history, and the present, is that people do have such interests, and that they use both their power and their wealth to secure their positions. I fail to see why this is particularly controversial, except that it suggests moral culpability for actions that have, for a long time, been lauded.
I can see that you are not arguing to maintain the status quo, but I hope you recognise that the greater social justice in modern capitalism, which is constantly under attack from the right, was fought for over long periods. The rights we enjoy today were not given to us by the benevolence of our leaders.
Sorry for the long post! ;-)
That referred to the post which started this thread.
In both cases I was speaking about the opinions I encounter in this debate more generally.
Ok, I'm not sure there's much point in debating general opinion; it makes it very confusing if you attempt to debate interlocutors of your own invention.
I'm still wary of the notion that we should pretend that no one has an interest in concentrating power and wealth, and maintain the status quo. My reading of history, and the present, is that people do have such interests
Everyone has this interest, whether they have power and wealth presently or not, and whether they admit it or not, and I don't see it as culpable, merely something to be managed. It can even be healthy in small doses, in encouraging competition rather than resignation. I'm not sure many would claim that all progress comes via capitalism, but recent globalisation has resulted in a shift in wealth to countries which are developing due to trade, and I do find the question of how much regulated capitalism has contributed to global levelling an interesting one.
Anyway, it seems to me that we largely agree on the appropriate means to desirable ends - nothing too dramatic.
Thanks for the discussion!
I do love me some Marx on a Friday afternoon!
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
If you think about wealth in this abstracted sense, a notch away from money, then you can see how basic trading dynamics might apply.
Yakovenko modelled the trading dynamics in a perfect game of chance (coin flips determine winners and losers). Something interesting emerged.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/7/075032
What it shows is that if everyone starts with the same amount of money, after a bit of random trading, their wealth is normally distributed (this is obvious if you are familiar with the binomial distribution). A few people are doing well, a few are doing badly, and most people are around where they started. As the trading continues though, it turns into a power curve where most people are doing badly and a few are taking everything. Its the same thing that happens when a rich man sits down at a poor man's poker table. He can keep putting him all in on every good hand and he only needs to be right maybe 1 in ten times and he wins everything. There's a runaeay effect after you hit a certain point.
Of course, things are a lot messier at this higher level interpretation of wealth since its harder to attach numbers to wealth in the form of political power, good health, and other factors which have a compounding effect (good health and political power help you make more money, but they cost money, so there's a feedback loop, but you xan equate them for simplicity). This is why people complain about a shrinking middle class.
The good news is that human life is messy we often allow our relationships to balance things out. The bad news is that we have gotten better and better at sterilizing our social and physical environments so the past might not predict what's coming next.
I don't make 100K but I did recently have what you might call a religious epiphany about my job, my finances, and freedom. Luckily for me, I have little debt and actually like my job a lot so I'm not the hole some folks are, God bless them all.
I just hope most of us aren't Bukowski's age when we realize we were building useless bullshit for useless people in order to buy useless plastic garbage. I know some of us are doing important work, but many of us are not.
Jeez, guys, we get one chance at this. Most people are destined to live anonymous lives so at the very least try to enjoy it.
No one holds a gun to the consumer's head, they just convince themselves they need thing. Then they whine when they haven't saved more than 300k for retirement at age 50 and social security is looking rocky.
Probably though I just need to quit Facebook again.
I think that we in the tech industry are... different here. In other industries, there is a /lot/ of pressure to look the part (well, to look an /expensive/ part.) Have you ever seen a real-estate agent in a car worth less than thirty grand? Hell, I've met a few sales folks and managers who wear watches they claim are worth at least half that.
Engineering is a little different in that we can dress down, and nobody is going to seriously give us shit for driving a piece of junk car. One can reasonably be a six-figure computer nerd and be a frugal person. A six figure salesman would be... well, he would be breaking a lot of expectations if he lived frugally.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/how-americ...
Also, spend lavishly on the best clothes, eat lavishly, but drive a very modest car and live in a modest home. People don't know what to make of that.
Really? huh. My experience has been that even foreign workers demand $10+ per hour, which is enough for a shitty car in a low cost of living area in the US. Good English is a reasonable multiplier.
You are not perceived as eccentric geniuses, not by anyone. Never, ever. They might say that to keep you on the treadmill but the the truth is that (especially by VCs) you are perceived as cannon fodder with a personal hygiene problem. You are kept around as long as you are useful and don't bitch too much. The minute that stops you are out on your ear. Welcome to the real world.
My point was just that if you are in management or sales, it seems that having expensive clothing and an expensive car are part of that 'being useful' - Appearance is a huge part of those jobs that are primarily human interaction. Appearance is a hugely important when dealing with other humans. I mean, I'm not saying that social skills and appearance don't matter for the technical individual contributor; they do, but it is not everything (like it is for management and sales.) It is possible to be technically good enough that people are willing to employ you in spite of your poor social skills. Obviously, that isn't the case for sales and management (as those jobs are, in a very real sense, social skills in and of themselves.)
Also note: If you are dealing directly with VC, you are more sales/management than an individual contributor.
Also, might want to work with that resentment problem of yours.
If you're talking about dressing cleanly, not betraying only passing acquaintance with showers by one's smell and being able to appear in public without shocking small children into tears - yes, sure. But that costs next to no money. Beyond that - nobody could care less which car you're driving and which house you're living in, unless you're a bank president or some other C level executive or business owner, where your conspicuous consumption skills may imply the success of your business. If you, however, are a professional, there's no problem with living simply, should you wish so, if that doesn't imply looking like a dervish or living literally in a cave.
Yeah, this is what I was talking about with our industry being different. This is... common for programmers. You don't even have to be uncommonly good, just useful.
But I think this is dramatically harder in other industries; to the point where I've never met, say, a real-estate agent like that, or a lawyer.
I've not only seen such an agent, I've engaged hers & his (they're a couple) services to buy my house. And it was just fine. Of course, I don't know the exact price tag on their car, but it was a moderately old suv, nothing flashy, probably nowhere near 30K. Actually, I'd be more vary of an agent with a really expensive car - if he's already so rich, would he care about getting my money enough?
They want to stay near their close family & friends, because they love them and want to see them and want their kids to grow up around them. Which means spending X per month on a house.
They want to have a car that doesn't embarrass them when they drive into work or round their friends, because owning a BMW has been a secret dream and it's a totally reasonable price, and a smooth ride and great acceleration.
They value different things than you and that all costs money.
I'm actually somewhere between the 'norm' and your view, but at least I'm realistic enough to realise that my priorities are different to most people's. I understand why they buy what they buy.
Most people aren't massive over-consumers.
This is really pushing it. Anybody buying a BMW on $100k in Silicon Valley while paying SV-level rents is a pretty big over-consumer. If you have a family on top of that, well... you won't be retiring any time soon.
I also find it odd that you jump immediately from "a car that doesn't embarrass them" to BMW. There's no in between? You have to go all the way to a luxury BMW to not be embarrassed by your car?
By all means, if you really value owning a BMW then get one, but unless you're making considerably north of $100k you don't have a strong case for not being an over-consumer.
You know how much $100k was when the term "six figure salary" started being used in the early 60s? Let me put it this way. The rich Donald Draper on Mad Men made $45k. $100k would have been more like $800k today. That was a CEO's salary. A "six figure salary" today is nothing like what it was when that term was coined.
Exhibit A is whenever a story about public employees makes the front page of HN (for example, the Detroit bankruptcy or the BART strike) and people start freaking out about train operators making $100K: "They don't even have college degrees, for godsakes!"
The car retains the majority of its value, they enjoy the car, they're not actually spending massive amounts of money like you seem to think they are. It's essentially a hobby item that they enjoy driving.
And it's only a proportion of my friends, some just get other cars that are a lot cheaper to run.
I remember checking how leasing a Porsche for 3 years would cost me less than half of the value the car would lose in that time.
In general, though, the best way to combat the depreciation of a car's value is to take out a long-term 0% interest loan, provided of course that you can get it. This works because (1) inflation reduces your effective net expenditure on the car; (2) you can take the cash you would have spent on the car and invest it instead; if you even conservatively get 3% returns a year, you've still come out far ahead.
Regarding (2), if you can't afford the car in cash, then you can't afford the car. That's always been my motto. Financing is a choice; it should never be something you are forced to do, unless this is your first car straight out of school and you just have no money yet.
Got married to someone who thinks like I do wrt to retirement and with one child we are on track to 'retire' when we want to. Barring us doing something dumb or global financial meltdowns - by mid 50s or so. I put retire in quotes because who believe in retirement where one site on their ass all day and says I'm so glad I don't have to work any more? I don't. Retirement means we will be able to give meaningful time to .org's that need it. But this will still be 'work'. I can't imagine a worse hell than retirement where I have no meaningful work to do.
Note: with two or more children much of what I can still do would need to be re-evaluated.
The cost is over a $1,000,000 (with a Dr. Evil pinky). If you look at the costs online, then you will see something between $200K to $400K depending on how good of parent are you. However, this doesn't bring in the opportunity cost of investing. If you just take the 18 year time span, then the first year is insanely expensive. Now, imagine it expanding 30, 40, 50 years out.
I'd write more but, as you say, we only get one chance at this and we're living in the best time ever.
http://bukowski.net/timeline/
Martin expresses concern for Bukowski's "image" when he buys a new BMW. Volkswagon Beetle is relegated to the garage.
Water view, but it's of the harbor, which is mainly shipping. Kind of like the difference of a bay view from Oakland, CA and the SF Peninsula, Tacoma/West Seattle and Magnolia, or Newark and Manhattan.
Am I lucky to make a good salary that allows me to pay these things down? Absolutely. However, I'm also responsible for the choices I make. Many people make more than I do and don't save as much, many More people make less and drive cars that are twice as expensive as mine.
Debt is leverage. Leverage, applied correctly, is an excellent means for accelerating the furtherance of a goal. Is having debt on a house a bad thing? Certainly not in a rising market, or in a market where rents tend to exceed mortgage payments. Additionally, equity gained in that house can be leveraged when times get rough in the future, or a new opportunity arises. Most people do not have the capital power to buy a home outright, even after many years of saving -- if you're spending on rent, you likely cannot save enough for an entire home in one lump sum. Most notably, you'd have to have a very smart growth strategy on that saving to beat both inflation and the rising prices of homes in the area you want to live over the course of the 15-20 years you'd have to employ that strategy. Therefore, for those with the wherewithal to manage their leverage correctly and effectively, a loan makes a lot of sense - they don't have to pay the rents, and they've gambled, successfully or otherwise TBD, against the future price of that home. They can as well make a decision to take gains early, long before ever having had to lay out the entire capital should their local market rise. In the case of 20% down on a $100k house that increases to $200k in value over 3 years with a total of $24k spent in payments over that time = $100k in returns for $44k invested, or a profit of $56k, with no additional rent charges during that time.
In addition, the same can run true for a vehicle. If a person needs a vehicle for transportation, they can apply leverage, especially if they do so wisely, to purchase a vehicle better suited to their needs than their normal cash flow allows. I, for example, could be fine with a 20-year old vehicle that needs regular maintenance. I can do that maintenance myself. Someone else may rightly say a 5-6% interest rate over three years is less costly to them than monthly visits to their mechanic.
So, this "debt is bad," thing is mostly stated by people who get leveraged beyond their means, or don't understand how to successfully apply the right amount of leverage at the right time. No debt can be as bad for one's fortunes as too much debt.
Very few Americans (or otherwise) could consider the idea of owning a house and a car outright at 45 without ever having taken on debt.
Debt isn't bad, debt is great - provided a) your time machine use doesn't cost too much and b) you really will have this money in the future (or, in other words, can keep up with the payments). Most problems with debt stem from misunderstanding the concept that it doesn't produce money, only shifts money around in time, and does not produce, but rather consume money - and of course from failure, deliberate or out of ignorance, to predict one's future amount of money. People also tend to double-count future money - once they debt-shifted it to present, they still consider it being there in the future, available for another debt-shift. This is where the trouble starts.
Having to wear a nice suit is also a failure. I would never consider working anywhere where I have to wear a suit.
Edit: My overarching point being that attitudes are changing. The 'American dream' doesn't really apply anymore, and especially not everywhere.
Having to wear a nice suit is not failure either. Both cars and suits are just tools. It's what you use a tool for that matters. Also I'll note if you resent wearing a suit, you have never actually worn a nice one...
Regarding my suit comment, it's about looking into the mirror in the morning and thinking whether the person you see is really who you once aspired to be.
Some people like to wear suits. One of my friend's greatest days was when just off high school he got straight into finance and finally could wear a suit 24/7. It genuinely makes him happy, it's an extension of his personality. He wants to be the big-shot-80s-New-York-cocaine-snorting-penthouse-owner-investment-banker type of guy.
But for me and I guess many others, to walk the earth in a suit would be, I don't know...perhaps the antithesis of existence. I think most people never think about it and even enjoy the office culture in a perverse way. Perhaps it's some form of a groupthink empathy, a we're-all-in-this-together style of getting a kick out of this masked suffering. I remember being a small kid and swearing I'd never be like an office manager or the bankers I saw, all wearing the same suits and becoming an empty shell that just assumes whatever of a corporate idenitity, becoming an embodiment of a foreign entity. Really just a zombie or a host for a parasite until it chews you out.
Because it does chew you out exactly as stated in this Bukowski letter, you're not really getting out. All the prices, the whole economy is set upon this 40-hour workweek, wage slave reality. All value is derived from this standard. I saw this very clearly 20+ years ago without even knowing the proper vocabulary to understand it. It's surprising how simple and clear it is, yet it's collectively decided that we don't want to look at it, we don't want to face it. You want out? The only way is to become the embodiment of the hope of getting out - a well-known star that can sell us the dream. And we'll gladly pay for it!
But you're right, the binge-drinking, fixed-bike urbano hipster thing is also a joke. We're all a joke in the end. But at least we could maybe strive to be funnier than we are because the joke is getting old.
EDIT: should really be pathetic and sad and not depressing, but I think you get my point. Youth and health are so precious that no amount of money compensates ever.
all your efforts are to look younger, but this is lost as your youth is long gone. if you think you made great use of it by sitting at the office... well not even sure how to comment on this.
let me rephrase it: guy in 911 in his 50s even in great shape is a little bit like a woman in her 50s in great shape who just had a boob job done.
"Enjoy your Golden years" has turned into "Winter is coming."
Without including the chance to really mature, you are basically talking about extending adolescence, and we already complain about how irresponsible and short-sighted twenty-year-olds are today.
The reason I ask is because without distinctions, it is difficult to tell what your motivations are and what about what kind of work you find attractive.
As a side note, the word 'work' of the industrial revolution sense being combined with notions that it automatically makes you better than people who don't 'work' in the same sense because it makes them more childish was one of those 'white-man's burden' type justifications for imperialism because of that particular poem's observation that non-european first nation people were 'half-devil and half-child'.
NOT an accusation of you. Just an observation. :) This is and, will be, a contentious topic in the near future, I think.
The problem comes when people limit themselves to a singular purpose and spend the rest of their time being consumers. The don't learn and grow and so end up in this rut for the duration. You're left with aging, atrophied, one-dimensional automatons who don't know anything else besides the grind and T.V. to relax in the evening. Rinse, repeat. When they retire they have no idea what to do with themselves and the thought of figuring it out probably makes them anxious so they stick to what they know.
Speaking of which, I gotta go. TMZ is on soon...
A few folks I've known worked until they simply couldn't, then died a few months later.
I'm reminded of my own father, who worked like a dog since he was a pre-teen, and simply hasn't been able to come to terms with retirement, choosing to start another job in his elder years instead of writing, painting and fishing which he has an obvious talent and interest in.
I tell myself that I won't succumb to this failure to live life and try to overcompensate a bit by traveling a lot, photography and many stalled attempts at writing. I wonder what would happen if I got fuck you money and if I could discipline myself to follow up to my passions instead of trying to fit them into my free time.
http://5by5.tv/b2w/120
At around 42:00-56:00, (I made a note because I liked it so much), they start talking about safety nets and how we think about events changing our behavior. Merlin made the point that if you're not practicing enjoying your weekends now, having a lot of money can give you a more expensive weekend, but not necessarily a more enjoyable one. A more productive strategy is to rehearse how to be happy with what you have, not what it would be like if you didn't have to worry about anything (because that's probably never going to happen).
Here's another crazy idea: become financially independent in your 30s; no hitting the startup jackpot required: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145360121X/ref=ox_sc_act_ti...
Also odd is the flip at the other end of the scale. You live your childhood, go to college and don't need to think much about career and then all of a sudden you get sucked into the cycle (graduating from college.) I was working from an internet cafe in the Philippines the other day (my connection at home was down and I needed to knock some stuff out) and while I was busting my ass the the kids (late high school and college aged) in there were playing games or checking Facebook. Occasionally there is someone in there working on homework.
The economy here in the Philippines sucks. These kids will graduate from college and be lucky to make minimum wage, which is $5 - $6 per day. A good job where I live in the Philippines is a call center position which pays something like $300 / month. Of course, the call centers require that you have a college degree. Even a lot of cashier positions at the local stores require a college degree. Because labor is so cheap, it's not uncommon to walk into a small store and see a half dozen workers behind the counter where in the U.S. you might only see one or two. That doesn't mean the service is better though. ;)
So, talk about slavery. I want to tell these people who are going to college and playing online games during their off-time that they are being conned. They are wasting their time going to college and then wasting their free time thinking college will bring success. What they really need to be doing is exiting the system and plowing their own path. There is nothing preventing them from doing what I do, sitting right next to them making in one day what they might make in a month. Good thing they haven't figured that out yet, I might have a bit of competition!
Sure, you need to find a balance, for yourself and friends and family. But where work is utterly separate from being alive I think something is broken. Just consider what dogs enjoy doing most: running after stuff and biting it. You could say, doing their job, that's what makes them fucking happy. Most animals are harder to read than dogs when it comes to happiness, but I really don't see dragging anyone "dragging their feet to work" except humans, and maybe some animals that lived too close to humans, or were caged by them.
For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost. And yet we don't – instead the vast majority of us continue to work hard to provide that global elite their "due".
Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Are you sure we have all the fuel and land to feed, house and clothe everyone? And if so, who's going to work for that? If everyone gets food and shelter for free, I'm not working to provide that.
The reality is, food needs to be grown, clothes made and houses built. Some people need to work for that. In exchange for that work, they ask some sort of compensation from others, in the form of other services or goods. This has nothing to do with the "global elite", this is just the nature of trade. I think giving someone stuff for free without getting anything in return is a greater injustice than this "instutionalized theft" you speak of.
Explain how this works logically. Do you honestly believe that if you simply took most of the money from rich people, that you would be able to sustainably feed everyone else? Have you considered all, if any, of the potential consequences of this action?
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Again, explain how this works. A major issue with food, for example, is not one of production but instead transportation and distribution. How would making the rich poorer solve this problem?
> Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
Define justice.
And who on Earth do you trust to take and do well with all of the money taken from rich people?
At least a setup where right to live is actual right to live and does not degrade to right to not get killed.
Does that mean that you also don't support kicking renters to the curb during winter months if they don't pay?
Charity has its place, I advocate and facilitate it, and am not under any delusion that it comes from compelling others to contribute.
There are a lot of people such as you that think that right to own things and do whatever you like with the things you own trumps pretty much every other right. Including the right not to get killed of the people who'd try to steal your stuff. Fortunately lawmakers in lots of first world countries got passed that barbaric notion. In my country for example you can't hurt the thief. You can try to hold him until the police comes, but if you beat the shit out of him or set a booby trap to harm him you will be prosecuted because you endangered his life and health, a value more important than your petty stuff. Same way you can smash the window of a car parked in the sun on a hot day if you see dog left inside. You are violating less important right to protect higher value.
But because they have so much money they can hoard resources. And they do to earn more like so: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/goldman-sachss-alu... They also hoard food: http://www.dw.de/germanys-dz-bank-ends-food-speculation-trad... They also can hoard companies. Buy them and harm them. This happens to most acquired startups.
The problem is not that they have a lot of money. The problem is what they do with the money. Of course it's not all bad. There are things that rich people made that benefited everybody, but I'm guessing most such things were created on the way to getting rich.
And that reduced demand doesn't come from people needing less real estate to live. Just from the fact that real estate reached prices that most people can't afford even if they pay with slaving their whole life for mortgage.
Reasonable price for apartment would be what most people could save up during the time they still live with their parents. But since real estate backed credit is legal that's not gonna happen. Such credit allows people to sell their future work in a manner almost perfectly safe for the bank. Thanks to this since you need place to live to have a life it can cost huge part of what you earn in life.
The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
If you spread population of the world to occupy all the land evenly it would be only 300 feet from each person to its closes neighbors. So it's not that much free space.
> The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
And this makes the problem of price elevation from hoarding real estate even more pronounced.
People will live where they can find jobs, and the very concentration of people brings in even more jobs to cities. As much as some cite the amenities of large cities to stay, a very large portion of the retiring population move away as soon as they don't need to work anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
The tiny global elite you impugne does not hoard anything relevant. They are just a hose thru which a lot of high velocity money flows, most of their income flowing right back out to others. Without them, the structure for working for that $12,000 average income would collapse and you'd be working a lot harder for a lot less net return.
Take that high density money away from that elite, and you'll discover two things happen. One, you'll be out of a job and relegated to living exactly as a large percentage of world population does: eking out a meager existence from the land to paltry returns; that elite holds the high-wage system together because they profit from it, and without those returns there is little incentive to make such systems work. Two, averaging out all income & wealth so everyone has the same would soon coalesce back into the distribution we have now: those expecting a no-effort living wage produce nothing and get nothing for it, while those enticed by work*risk=profit will find a way and earn that which the others will give to survive.
Yes, institutionalized theft: those who work and take risks having their earnings taken by threat of force by those having no moral & economic interest therein or beyond what was contracted for in a competitive market. Go live off the land for a year, excluding any connection to "the elite", and then tell me about the justice of someone taking the fruits of your labors from you simply because they exist (choosing not to produce).
With less than 5% people employed in agriculture [1], it must be possible to allocate resources in a way that does not require most people to waste their lives in jobs. The universal basic income, for instance, would achieve that without abolishing capitalism.
The only problem are people who glorify employment.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?order=wba... (I speak of developed countries only)
Glorify employment? The socioeconomic world is as good as it is because most people are employed, doing something which contributes to maintenance and advancement of society & technology. By glorifying unemployment, you're proposing removing the efforts which maintain our socioeconomic position & direction, soon leaving us with insufficient effort to even maintain a status quo.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Alice In Wonderland
The resources of which you speak are, on the whole, perishable consumables. Remember: any society is 3 food-sparse days from violent breakdown. We have to work hard to keep things as they are, and twice as hard to get to where we want to go. Cutting workforce in half means the remaining workers must work twice as hard just to keep everyone as they are, and four times harder if any real progress is desired. Universal basic income means those not earning it are supported by those who do - reducing the incentive to work at all. You say "*it must be possible to allocate resources..." - it isn't, short of incentivising tremendous work times high risk with expectations of huge payoff.
Can you justify this? If we use the US as an example and look at the most common jobs, we find that over 4 million people are employed as salespersons, another 3 million as cashiers, followed by 3 million people employed serving food (including fast food), etc. [1]
As the population has been moved away from agriculture, and recently manufacturing, they have become increasingly employed in the service sector. These people are not creating and advancing the technology of tomorrow, they are preforming basic tasks that could easily be done by the customers themselves (eg. automated checkouts).
What's more, there is now millions of people employed in areas such as advertising and sales, where people are essentially tasked with manufacturing wants and increasing the amount of money people spend, which not only defeats the entire basis of a functioning economic system (rational consumers making rational choices), but ensures that additional numbers of people are employed in the manufacture of superfluous goods that people are deceived into buying.
Is there any indication that if we seriously consider what is and isn't necessary in our society, the working population couldn't easily be cut by half without any kind of imminent collapse?
1. http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%...
edit: spelling
I dislike human-clerk checkouts at stores. Nothing against people per se, but as a high-tech introvert I'd rather do it myself - exactly as you suggest. Sure, the technology is there; heck, Walmart even has a phone-based self-scanner so you can do 95% of checkout before you even get to the self-serve register for final payment. The technology sounds great on paper and in rhetoric, but in reality it sucks (despite my valiant concerted efforts to be a automation-supporting customer). Standard self-checkout chokes on the bottle of wine ("Human clerk, is customer over 21?" Uh, yeah, I'm greying with two kids in tow, of course I'm of age). Phone-based on-the-go checkout is time consuming (stop, turn on phone (again), tap Scan, point camera, wait for slow auto-focus, wait for crappy in-store wireless connection to function, get to payment station, get selected for another 15-minute "you've been selected for a compliance check" which confuses human staff every time). Never mind shoplifting, mis-scans, and a host of other problems. Those ten million "technology replaceable staff" are still employed because they're better at the work than technology, and relieving them of their duties does NOT make their freed-up wages available for confiscation & redistribution as "living wages" to the now-unemployed former workers (it's going to technology costs and high-tech maintenance staff). That's 10M people "contributing to maintenance of society".
As for manufacturing wants and increasing money spent vs. consumers making rational choices? I'm watching a startup put serious money into marketing staff; the product is [r]evolutionary and WILL "advance society & technology", but isn't going anywhere without convincing a lot of people to buy it, and the staff IS earning their significant wages by doing so. Oh sure, there's a lot of sales of superfluous goods out there, but even that helps fill out & support an infrastructure which gets vital goods to a broad clientele: Walmart isn't going to get five pounds of bread flour on a shelf for $1.89 without the delivery system greased with the profits from the "cheap crap" they're famous for; in comparison, that same sack of flour would cost about $5 at everything-is-perfect Whole Foods.
Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
So yes, these people are "contributing to the maintenance of society", but there are conceivable alternatives that would give these individuals (and society as a whole) more liberty, and would only require some small inconveniences.
The anecdote you give of your startup which needs advertising to get off the ground is beside the point. Perhaps your startup is revolutionary, and perhaps it needs some advertising to get off the ground, but this doesn't change the fact that most advertising is simply misinformation. Television commercials which make use of lush landscapes and half-naked women to sell cars don't create rational consumers, and without rational consumers you cannot have a functioning market. If advertising was simply a way in which companies communicated well-reasoned facts about products, and came with a balanced analysis of a product and its competitors, then we could argue that advertising was working towards creating a functioning market system. Until then, advertising will simply favour those with the largest advertising budgets and those who are best at disinformation, and so it's difficult to argue it is contributing to society.
> Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
This is really cheap rhetoric -- and not even accurate. If I'm arguing for a society where people are liberated from work, why are you using the Soviet Union, a dictatorship where everyone worked all the time, as some kind of counterpoint? Not everything that contradicts the status-quo is totalitarian communism, you know.
Besides, the points I'm trying to make aren't even original. There are serious proposals that have been made for why society should move to a 20-hour work week to address things ranging from rising levels of depression to climate change. [1]
[1] http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours
You can live on a very very small income right now. I figure an intelligent frugal life can suffice at $10/day. But you don't, because you won't give up what you don't need.
That's not life. It's just a rule that comes out of the fact that people won't care about you if you give them no benefit. It's only natural but is it right or humane?
You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others.
World average income equals the USA poverty line. That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive. Charity, yes indeed, but there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead.
The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely, not to put a gun to someone's head and demand what's not yours.
i dont believe this to be true (tho i'd like to see any reliable sources).
I find it more likely that a small number of people control so much "productivity" that the majority must either be "coerced" into cooperating in order to get some of the crumbs, or that they lack the basic resources to dig themselves out of the poverty hole. Its true that they aren't productive enough to support themselves, but i would imagine they would if they had the chance.
There are some exceptions. You don't have to work a single day in your life if:
- you inherited wealth.
- you are homeless and sustain yourself with whatever you can get without paying.
- you commit crimes and are put in prison.
- you are a woman and merry well.
- you build something as a hobby and it makes big.
> That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive.
That would be true if people were source of wealth. But source of wealth for many years now are the machines, and this wealth increased disproportionately to increase in population. If on average we are coming out of poverty at slower rate than the growth of wealth our machines produce then something is wrong.
> The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely
Almost no one gives anybody anything freely. Do you think your employer would give you anything for your work if he didn't have to?
The ones that have more have it often because they exchanged something worth less for something worth more. The ones that have less have it often because they exchange something worth more for something worth less.
Why they do it? Because exchange often is not free. Lot's of people have no choice but to exchange good that is very valuable for them and irreplaceable (such as hours of their life) for something as plain, abundant and worthless in our modern world as food.
Excuse me, but you're an idiot. (Unless your whole comment is meant as a joke.)
People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always. In the case above, you exchange hours of your life for food so that you can live another day.
Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision. Once we create such a world, great! But capitalism dictates that once this happens, the price of goods will drop tremendously. The fact that this has not yet happened tells you that this spot has not yet been reached.
There are some goods that have so high a value it will be worth trading almost anything for it. Eating is one, medical care is another. This fact is routinely exploited so that those not in danger of losing those highly valuable things get more out of an exchange. The execs that run McDonald's don't have to worry about acquiring food or health care, they have the class advantage to securely have those things. And yet this same company puts out a spending guide to the workers that get low wages suggesting they have 2 jobs and that they put no money towards health care or heating their apt/homes. Those low wage workers can't simply stop working there, their ability to live and eat is in direct danger from losing that work. Is that a fair exchange?
> Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision.
It doesn't matter if machines are 100% automated and don't require humans. What matters it that as machine automation gets more efficient and requires less humans to operate, the more previously employed human workers lose their ability to work and therefore their ability to eat and have shelter. And yet the ownership classes don't suffer from this advancement, they still continue to consume and funnel money and resources into themselves. Is that a fair exchange?
2) However, the question whether this is socially or even globally fair is not a question of capitalism, but of politics/government. If things continue this way, sooner or later there will be too many unemployed people and there will be a revolt/class revolution. I believe the elite will work hard to prevent it, by introducing some kind of wealth/capital tax that will redistribute wealth to the not-haves.
You are an optimist then. I think more popular sentiment seem to be rather that elite will use its advantage to develop surveillance, law and prison system to detain whoever opposes them. After all they had one communist revolution to learn such things have to be actively mitigated.
You might argue that keeping poor in prison is a way of providing for them. And since less and less criminal people will go there it might some day become some sort support center for homeless/jobless.
Someone puts gun to your head and tells you to cut off your left hand in exchange for him not pulling the trigger. Both parties benefit from such exchange. You get the rest of your life, and he gets his amusement. Wouldn't you agree that such exchange wouldn't be exactly just and free?
Let's assume that this trade is unfair even though you might see it as benefiting both parties in some way so unfair trades exist. One might say that it would be illegal and all legal trades are free. But if law can so perfectly tell fair trade from unfair trade then why the law changes over time? And how do we know that now the law is perfect, not like it was 100 years ago or like it will be 100 years in the future?
My comments were serious, so I guess I'm idiot, at least from your point of view.
Also, you are imprecise to say that "people" are the source of wealth. If we go with your claim, labor is the source of wealth, in which case capitalism is indeed systematized exploitation and theft from the true source of all wealth: workers.
Yes, Bulkowski observed that most people are in unfulfilling jobs, and he was happy to escape that life to pursue what pleased him. He failed to note that to leave those jobs would be a terminal move because they had nothing they found fulfilling which would at the same time create livable productivity. He was lucky enough to have notable talent in doing something fulfilling to the point that someone else was willing to exchange a "living wage" for it, and he was happy as a result. I'm happy too, having found my equivalent combination of joyful productivity coupled with a satisfying fair wage for writing (iOS code instead of English prose).
Yes, we lament those who toil to unsatisfying ends. So ask each and every one of them: what do you want to do? Most answers you receive, alas, would be either "I don't know" or something not rising to the exchangeable equivalent of sustenance farming. Natural reality being that you do not get fed & clothed just for mere existence, all have a natural obligation to produce enough for themselves & dependents to survive on, and if they can't find a pleasant way to do it then they must find an unpleasant way as charity (while morally obligatory) can only go so far.
And a big grin at the people saying we working in tech can make a difference. Creating a new social photo sharing app is not changing the world. Get real.
As a trapped life, the closest you can do to live happy is to do as much what you want (again coming back to the above) while living in the system. And yes, working in tech gives yoy higher chances to live how and where you want, but it stops there.
The only way to escape is living separate, somewhere deep down a rainforest. But then what, die from a snake bite or die from fever. Sounds better, no?
What about a medical start-up or one to do with education?
OK, so you're unlikely to regret not robbing a bank, but do you think you're any more likely to regret robbing a bank? Bear in mind that requires you to a) rob a bank and b) regret it. Sure, given a) it seems plausible you'd regret it, but it also seems exceedingly unlikely you'll actually rob a bank, even following that advice.
It's the actions that we toy with but never get around to that count, not the things that we know full-well are terrible ideas.
You could regard the invention of agriculture as the curse which permanently excluded humankind from the hunter-gatherer Garden of Eden.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
It is not about the things we do not do, it is about having had enough.
I also want to be a motivational speaker when I 'grow up'. I came from humble beginnings. Some people's talks have really changed my life. In order to give those talks and be invited to speak, yes you have to ascend the established social order.
Am I wasting my life by working a lot? No. The things I work so hard for have real effects in this world. My mom has been working for over 40 years of her life. If I do things right, she'll be able to retire eventually. Do I work harder than other people do for the same, or less, compensation? I'm sure I do. But you know what, you have to make the best of the situation you're in.
I was recently invited to give my first talk. Here is the abridged executive summary: http://www.evernote.com/shard/s34/sh/9a92bf45-27e1-4470-be7e...
once you realize that work by definition is your life, you'll take it more seriously, especially if it is harmful to you. you do not have to swallow each and every bullshit thrown at you, this is your life. you want to travel, experience other cultures? use work to reach this goal. nothing shows you other cultures like working with them directly, on the ground. lots of consulting gigs allow you to do this.
i also don't get this inherent fear that seems prevalent in US corporate culture. well, i fundamentally understand, in Europe you can't get fired on a whim, but over here in US I see this amazing mindset around CEOs and how people behave around them. Massaging emails until they definitely won't cause a ruckus, filtering, keeping silent. Why? Because CEO.
your work time is your life time. treat it as such.
coincidentally the people I have met that have understood this seem to have great careers. they go all in and are not driven by fear. my first boss called this mindset "scheiss di ned aun", viennese for "don't shit yourself". life's too short to be afraid of suits and orgcharts.
My goal is to make as much money as I can as fast as I can so that instead of trying to become the next billionaire, I can stop working and become the next great thinker. I value knowledge and happiness over money.
I realized I could live off of $25000/yr and maintain a modestly comfortable lifestyle at the same time. I am on track to retire before I am 40. Anyone can do it.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-...
Awesome! Congrats on being on track to retire early. Just be prepared for it. From what I understand, a lot of people who retire get bored. If I didn't have to worry about money today, I would be volunteering a lot. If money was no object, I would be traveling a lot.
Correction: anyone who graduates without debt and starts their careers making good money can do it.
(You're not retiring on $25K a year in any part of Boston, NYC, Seattle, or any other reasonably vibrant urban area without making brutal compromises in terms of quality of life.)
For example, $25k a year can be quite comfortable in Denver, which is a reasonably vibrant urban area.
I'm living in Denver with one kid, a car, and less than $25k in income. And my life is awesome.
Maybe you have a different definition of "shitty" than me. Or maybe you don't realize how well you can live on that kind of money with a paid off house.
If we assume that the $25k is net, not gross, then I can see how it could be reasonably comfortable for one person with no rent or mortgage. You'd really want to go to a place with cheap property taxes to minimize unavoidable recurring housing costs. But anyway, you'd have roughly $2k to spend each month, which seems like it could comfortably cover utilities, food, transportation, and some entertainment, even in a non-shitty place. Keep in mind you wouldn't have to save money because you're retired--this is supposed to be solid and stable revenue for the remainder of your life (but only time will tell if that holds true).
Of course, throw in other people to support on that income, like kids, and it definitely gets tighter, but I don't think this number is at all unreasonable for a single person supporting only themselves with no debt and complete ownership of a home.
I am under the assumption I could do it a lot cheaper if I were to choose not to have a family and to live in rural or semi-rural North Carolina.
(Edit: I picked North Carolina becuase that's where I already am.)
I'm surprised that you came up with $25,000.
People are still working in factories to put bread on their tables. There is a huge amount of poverty in the world.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
I still don't see the rosy picture you're painting.
edit: Poverty in the US is hovering at the same rate since the 60's from what I can tell, while absolute numbers obviously are rising. So.. what am I missing? Something like People aren't working in factories to put bread on the table, people are working in offices to pay for their next new car or big screen TV. just sounds nuts in the face of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
In the later half the of twentieth century, other advanced economies in Europe and Asia began to overtake the U.S. in terms of reducing hunger among their own populations. By 2011, a survey found that among 20 economies recognized as advanced by the International Monetary Fund and for which comparative rankings for food security were available, the U.S. was joint worst. [..] In comparison to other advanced economies, the U.S. had high levels of hunger even during the first few years of the 21st century, due in part to greater inequality and relatively less spending on welfare.
Maybe I'm dealing with this?
In the 1980s and 90s, advocates of small government were largely successful in de-politicizing hunger, making it hard to launch effective efforts to address the root causes, such as changing government policy to reduce poverty among low earners.
and I can only say, if only getting rid of poverty was as easy as ignoring the poor, or downvoting a post instead of responding to it. Corporate profits are soaring, people for the most part are still struggling, and they even seem to have lost their voice. So now we're free to just dream? Why actually make progress when you can just imagine it?
Yes, a lot of the workers seemed poor, but they were nowhere near living in the same conditions as the poor 50 or 100 years ago.
Were they working for "a big flat screen TV and a new car"?
"They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work." But then why don't the slaves leave? Unlike in the past, nobody is holding a gun to their head. One possibility, probably popular among entrepreneurial types, is the slaves don't leave, because they don't think they can leave. It's a problem that is easily solved! All the boring types need is a little bit of education, for them to learn that leaving is possibility.
But maybe, what scares us a little bit, is that maybe the slaves don't want to leave. They value that security that the boring life brings them (that is why they complain "it ain't right" - because they have lost something they really valued). This is the really scary thing, because we don't want to be boring but we could see ourselves making the same choice. At the same time we don't understand the choice of the slaves to not leave, we identify with it at a level that we maybe can't explain. But is it a wrong choice? Who are we to judge others for choosing security over wealth or self-exploration? Maybe we are at a knife edge- a little bit less motivation here, a marginal preference there, a taste of failure here, and we, too, would pick security over wealth (of money, of intellect, of experience). I think that the strange paternalistic attitude of the passage is a result of the fear - the fear of that condition.
What are they supposed to do? Quit without savings and try to change careers? (That's the feeling, anyways. Not sure what the answer is.)
It's certainly possible. I do think people generally lack the courage to try, but even that is besides my point. I think if even if people did have the courage, most would not WANT to. The don't want to leave the rat race, even though they hate it, because the security is what they crave.
Most blue collar people I know can't impose on friends too much - young ones might get a couch to crash, but their friends are too poor to pay for one month of free food and transport, so some sort of savings is mandatory if you want to quit. For older ones, it's unthinkable without significant savings.
That may be so, but I guess you're from the United States, right?
To be honest, my country has several welfare programs, but they're bureaucratic and marginalizing, I think most people wouldn't like hitting rock bottom like that, and for a dubious chance at a career change - my country does have free university, but I don't think you can do it from the street, and shelter is only available in winter.
I agree you wouldn't starve, at least in the U.S. or here in Uruguay, I can think of several places I wouldn't try it out, but it would be a huge hurdle to overcome (not to mention the difficulty of getting reinserted in society).
Wage slavery, the term, was coined when industrial jobs were coming on to the scene in the north and there was still slavery in the south. Groups of laborers in these new factories soon went on protest. They self-described their situation as being similar to slave work/living standards but with a wage. Basically what we today would call inhumane.
This sentiment never diminished but instead was overwhelmed by the dominance of industrialized work in this format. Their protest fell on deaf ears because now all the jobs offered were like that and unions decided to fight for better working conditions instead of the system at large. Which leads us to today.
It's hypocritical when employees lambaste labor movements but will gladly partake the fruits of better wages and working standards.
It seem human nature will put up with a lot of things. An anthropological account i read: The anthropologist visited some area around Tibet. The system in place there required newly married women upon marriage to leave their husbands and work for the lord of the area, often as a concubine. After a year or so she would leave but not to return to her husband but instead go to a work camp where she would serve as a comfort girl. After that she returned.
The obviously shocked anthropologist asked why did people put up with this arrangement? It seems the reply was a "that's the way it was" sentiment.
This is not to say I think lending should be abolished, I just think that paying back should be voluntary, the counterparty should assume all financial risk and the borrower should assume all reputation risk.
You can not do all of it on your own. Other people have to do it for you. But why other people would do it for you? They don't know you and have no obligations towards you and have no desire to work for you just because you're such a nice person. And even if they wanted, there's a scarcity of resources and time, why would they choose you? You have to offer them something. Like work for them in return, to do something they want but can't or won't do. Of course, you can't work for every person that participated in making your cellphone personally - that's where the money comes in.
Now when you talk about leaving - you can mean giving up all goods that our civilization gives us, sever your links with the mutual work exchange system and do it on your own. You can do that. But do you really want to? Your clothes, food and shelter would suck huge time. A simple caries may kill you. Your life would be brutal, miserable, full of pain and short (at least compared to what the civilization could give you). Is it worth it?
You can also talk about being essentially a parasite - not contributing anything and putting the surrounding people before the choice of giving you stuff for nothing or watching a disturbing picture of you slowly and painfully dying in their front porch. In our modern society, you can pretty safely bet most would choose give you something in order to avoid that. But is that really what anybody would want to be, given a choice?
You can also do worse - you can take weapons and threaten to harm your neighbors unless they work for you. If you demands are modest enough, they may choose to comply instead of creating a security layer that protects against you, since it'd be cheaper. But is it a really moral choice for anyone? If being slave is bad, how about being an enslaver?
If you have another alternative to participating in mutual work exchange system - what is it? How does it compare on outcomes and on morality?
There's honor -- and authenticity -- in making choices for your life that involve working in the system.
I used to look down on those who worked jobs they hated and would say things like "That's just not for me. I don't know how you can do it." until one day somebody took me aside and pointed out what an insulting and condescending attitude I had. I was being a jerk, a well-paid, able-to-pick-what-I-want-to-do jerk. Other people did not have the same lives or face the same choices as I did. I should respect their uniqueness and decisions -- even if they loudly and publicly complained about them.
I have learned that for myself it is too easy to go off on a wild tangent about how one lifestyle is so much better than another, talking about slavery and such, just like in this letter. Basically I was being a judgmental prick, substituting my values for other people's and then declaring that my choices and values were best for everybody.
I finally realized that the quality of life is something each of us owns through our own personal choices.
So I don't do that anymore.
And what does "authenticity" even mean in this context? There is authenticity and uniqueness in the things people do despite their soul killing jobs, but what's authentic about, say, selling your body? I find this just as condescending, sorry: If those people complain, i.e. if they say it sucks for them, then it sucks for them. Talking about authenticy and uniqueness, and pretending they have much a of a choice, is respecting a strawman (i.e. decisions they never got to make), while disrespecting their actual situation.
Most people have no real choice in their work, except in the technical sense of one shitty job versus another. Most people don't "own their lives", their lives are dictated to them. To dismiss those lives as it being them having made a personal choice (the implication presumably being that they could have chosen to be a VC or a surgeon) is contemptible.
Some people balk at the idea of "wage slavery," primarily because they think it is so different from the traditional slavery that it should not be called that.
But the question is, if you are doing something and the alternative is starvation and death, are you really a free human being? If you think about it for a while, the answer becomes clear: you are not free. Sure, you have the freedom to switch from one slave-owner to another, but at no point in the process do you have real freedom.
So is capitalism. So is the corporate hierarchy. Heck, the society we live in right now is man-made. Why does that matter as an evaluation criteria?
Yes, food and shelter have always required work. The difference is that they have required work by the person for the person. Or by the person for their family. Or by the person for their tribe. This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.
That is a very different set up than what we have now. The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.
You don't seem to understand what subsistence living means.
What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.
What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare.
The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.
Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.
You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.
The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.
I'm a dual Polish/US citizen. Poland has better life expectancy according to the CIA Factbook than the US does. Poland had an average income of 240usd per year as recently as 1989. It's about $20k today. Still can provide better life expectancy than the US. Shame.
I'm a Swedish/Australian dual-citizen, and although both countries have higher costs of goods, it seems a most reasonable price to pay to have functioning public health care.
So if you want a better standard of living than Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington could have dreamed of, you have to work, yes. Is that shocking or unreasonable? I doubt the men I just named would have thought so.
No. Subsistence living is entirely possible - there are millions of people doing just that somewhere in backwoods wherever, across a multitude of political systems and states, all over the world.
What you want as "subsistence living" is not its definition. What you're talking about is "how much labor cost it requires to maintain your current lifestyle in this current political system".
EDIT: I was late on this reply I guess.
You do know that in agrarian societies this meant 12 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays ever? And that children worked in the fields instead of going to school?
People don't subsistence farm because they don't want anything more than the bare minimum for survival. They subsistence farm because the bare minimum for survival is the best they can manage.
I have two questions for you that you should think about.
Question 1: Why is it that, as our productivity increases, we find more things to "fill up" our workday, instead of working fewer hours for the same output (which would satisfy our needs)?
Question 2: Forget about need. Do people actually want the things they are working for today? Or is it that we are socially conditioning them, from the moment they are born, that a consumption-based lifestyle is one they need to strive for?
We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
Is it? There are several hundred million Buddhists who might disagree with you.
>>We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.
Your cat wants attention, affection and canned wet food because as a pet it has gotten used to those things. There are a billion felines out there that are quite happy with living alone and marking their territory and hunting for and munching on raw meat.
>>You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.
It depends. I love to go cross-country backpacking and the only things I bring with me are the bare essentials: tent, sleeping bag, food and water, clothing and some emergency supplies.
>>Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...
Your argument is shifting away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you do not have to work 40+ hours a week for any of those things. You only have to do it because our capitalistic society is engineered that way.
Think about it like this: the productivity of the average worker has increased tremendously over the last century. Yet, instead of reducing work hours to account for the fact that we can produce the same amount of goods and services in less time, we have opted to work the same number of hours (or even longer in some cases) to produce more than society needs.
Even if everyone worked 20 hours a week, you could still enjoy your beer and athleticism and art and intellectual pursuits. In fact, you would have more time for them!
It is not an inherent human quality. Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods. They were lean.
Buddhism is much older than capitalism, so I somewhat doubt that.
> Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods.
They were, once they developed the means to derive use from them (making them goods, rather than valueless objects.)
Then how do you explain the necklaces, earrings, headpieces, etc etc etc found in the histories of tribes all around the world all through history?
Can you imagine a tribesman thinking, "man, I should work extra hard today and bring home more meat so I can afford that necklace the other guy has"?
Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.
They were imperialistic, mercantilistic, corporatist, fascistic, communal, the list goes on.
Adam Smith invented capitalism as a response to the mercantilism of 18th century England.
They all were. Not in social sense, but in the economic one. The challenge makes no sense. What is capitalism? As long as you let the markets work and don't interfere with people decisions on the market on a permanent basis this is capitalism. As you let the capital flow and accumulate. Once you impose restrictions to it based on ideology based in distrust to free economy or marktes, you don't have true capitalism. I.e. in communism private property is banned. Actually in some instances communists were propagating the idea of moneyless society. You haven't had such an assault on the idea of making money before socialism was invented. The first person who traded results of their labor for results of labor of someone else was a capitalist. And that's how it has always worked. Actually, even imposing penalties on people for doing trade, owning property, etc. as was common in communistic states, didn't change people's behavior who still wanted to enrich themselves. Meaning we are capitalists by design, it's as natural as eating meat. Might be inconvenient morally, but the facts are facts. Smith merely discovered/noticed the phenomenon and gave it a name. So not soon later it could have been and was attacked, but as long as our DNA doesn't change we are and will be capitalistic beings.
It's a recent invention, and requires much vigilance and restraint to be kept alive. In many ways it is already gone.
The thing that is so particularly sinister:
A: "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the others."
B: "You're right, so we should do away with affirmative action."
C: "Exactly, it's racist since these days there are plenty of white people that are just as disadvantaged."
D: "I hereby enact this law that officially ends affirmative action."
E: "Great, now let's solve the nuanced problems of inequality across the board!"
crickets
In this day and age, sustaining life should not require 40+ hours of work per week.
As a society we are producing a ridiculous amount of surplus, and then conditioning ourselves to consume that surplus so that we can produce even more.
Where does it end?
Until some place has a successful anarchic-type revolution (a la Spain & Paris) without an outside power coming in to overthrow them we're stuck with this legacy economic/political system and the best we can do is civilize it with prudent regulation (which we can barely do because it's been systemically corrupted).
Two examples:
1) I read an article where the writer took a job somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast in a non-heavily developed area. When he gets to the village he has no place to stay. How will I live?
What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot and over the next few days built him his house! It was simple but in line with the community standard. The expectation was that when someone else had a need (maybe a house) he would return the favor.
2) In the scandinavian model, I believe you get schooling paid for until you find a job and then you have to pay the gov't back. Which is sort of the reverse in NA where you pay upfront and hope to recoup the cost yourself. With that model it seems the gov't has incentive to ensure there are enough jobs so that they can recoup costs.
how is this different than borrowing money from a bank to get a house built? In the village, the westerner had a debt - sure it was verbal, but it is a debt never-the-less. This method don't work when the size of the village grows beyond a certain point (because you cannot keep track of more than about 100 people without needing written records and formalizatin).
Fast forward a few hundred years, and you end up with what we have right now - a system of money, credit and work. Its exactly the same, except with way more indirections so that the participants don't have to directly know each other and keep tabs on each other.
As for how it would scale, I don't know. Is the structure and culture of western urban society the only form possible?
However, most industrial societies, things are long past the point where most people would need to work full time in order to feed and shelter their populations -- we now employ a decided minority of the labor force doing those essentials.
Apparently instead of reaping a leisure dividend, though, we've decided other things are more important. Perhaps some of them even are.
Of course they don't have all the fancy toys. Or the worries and medications. Running away from an existence you've never really been given time to understand. Bukowski's right about how it empties you out. But unless you're lucky as him, few options have been left you. The land's all owned, and the "hunting" is long-gone.
In the end, only the market is free. Until the day you drop it and turn away.
That's because they live in low numbers in tropical climates, where food is plentiful throughout the year and shelter is never needed.
Even the punishment has become more moral and more evenly applied to all to of course avoid discrimination. You are subject to mental assault by all others and even by yourself when you do not follow the game of the wage slave. A violent death? A violent death would be a needle prick relative to the 60 years you are expected to slowly break yourself in half.
Indeed, the lack of freedom is but one facet, but honestly, while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?
Not everybody has this amazing idea they are absolutely passionate about and prioritize above everything else.
I just started working in a corporate environment. I'm the best at what I do. I work beyond hours. I also have a life. I can choose to go home and have a four hour game of thrones session, or I can invest my time into personal interests and developing myself.
It's up to the individual entirely. We live in a world where we are capable of forging our own path.
There is no lack of freedom, there is simply too much of it.
> while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?
YES. You have all the resources at your fingertips. Institutions, counselling, meetups for specific interests, the INTERNET where you can communicate with anybody in a millisecond.
It's up to you what you do with these powers. Will you be complacent, or will you use them to your advantage? It's sad that most people use our new found technological superpowers to bore themselves instead of learn about our beautiful planet and all it has to offer.
I'm in the middle of making monumental changes in my life, and if I had helped ingrain a lesson or mindset into another person as much as your outlook helped me, I would've liked to know.
So you are saying it is impossible to escape wage slavery.
It is impossible to live in modern society as people expect to without holding a job, but it is not impossible to live without holding a job.
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with you. His idea of America was the idea that there would be many small farms where people could be more or less self-sufficient and work would have instrinsic meaning. Of course, he had actual chattel slaves to help out. Hamilton had the idea that the US would become a trading nation. By their time, the industrial-capitalist revolution had not really gotten underway world-wide but the Hamiltonians won out in the end. The notion of 'work' as we know it now had also not really come into existence. Most people in the US worked on farms or otherwise for themselves.
Lincoln advocated 'free labor' as the moral and honest form of labor. Which took as a given that labor is greater than capital. Its proceeds should benefit completely its worker and his family not siphoned by the few who have capital.
Industrialization has made the workplace of the farm or workshop obsolete but I believe the principle could be maintained if workplaces were employee owned and managed democratically rather than authoritatively.
It also an attempt to bring a lot of connotations which simply aren't true. People don't use the word because they want to explain something the reader doesn't already know, they want to make the connotations that come with the word.
There are some things I like about the current job, and if I stick around at least another six months, I'll likely play a key role in overhauling the front end of a major automaker's website using state-of-the art. Not a bad feather to stick in a cap.
On the other hand, the chances that I'll do anything else in the meanwhile seem pretty slim. I notice in the last year alone, my energy for original/personal projects is diminished, I feel less creative/thoughtful in general -- and arguably even less interesting than during the aforementioned freelance period. I do feel, as Bukowski put it, somewhat emptied out by my work.
It's possible what I really need is a different full-time gig, since I have been in some full-time situations that felt energizing. But I'm starting to be convinced that when I'm hiring myself out part-time, I stay more personally grounded and sharper as far as my general skills and strength in the field goes.
Unfortunately, steady skilled part-time employment seems to be considerably more difficult to find than full-time.
so i've been giving this topic some serious thought. to work or not to work? that is the question.
I usually work a contract job for my University but I get my money in lump sums, so I was thinking I could put a sum into some sort of index fund, or even a currency fund.
I waited until I had 5-10x my annual expenses, but obviously you can do it with less. My main recommendation would to be have at least an extra 6 months of living expenses beyond what you need (so if you are taking a year off, have at least 1.5 yrs of living expenses) in case it takes a while to find work again. The main advantage of saving more than that is you can use the returns from your investments to offset some of your costs a bit.
I think made a great decision, but you ought to diversify your nest egg.
If there is some other asset class I am missing, let me know. In the meantime, I think I will take my chances with the market. Worst case, if things get bad, I can just go back to work (left my old company, in a fairly recession proof industry, on good terms)
That quote motivates me everyday, because it reminds me that the things I want in life will never be achieved by working at a place in any capacity where the choice of my continued employment lies in the hands of any one person.
I do love my job, though there is so much more I want to do with my life - so much more I could do that (as far as I can tell) would really help humanity. Unfortunately I'm locked into working because of student loans and overall cost of living. I try to do work in my free time but sadly 3 hours a night does not build a company with enough revenue to grant me freedom.
By the time I've earned enough from my job to afford not having a job I worry I'll have moved on to a different life stage where kids will take up my evenings.
I know I'm not the only talented, driven 20-something in this situation and with student loans recently so high, it is a pity to think that overall out generation will have fewer who are able to make their ideas real because of it. Thanks to YC for offsetting that effect and helping us believe we can "get free".
John Lewis makes a profit and the "partners" got 17% of salary as a bonus in FY12/13
http://uruguayeduca.edu.uy/Userfiles/P0001/File/Cooperativis...
We have:
- Transport cooperatives
- Dairy products cooperative (Conaprole)
- Healthcare cooperatives, which serve most of the population ("Mutualistas", based on Mutualism)
- An Insurance cooperative
- Credit Union cooperatives
- Housing cooperatives (those are the ones that worked out for the worst)
In many cases, they compete with non-cooperatives.
Edit: while they should be equal, even if they get same or slightly better pay, cooperative directors have lots of actual power, which can be turned to money if they so desire (kickbacks, etc...)
Besides, the value an employee generates does not come from the employee himself (if it did, he could do the same task outside of a company and earn money). His effort is channeled through several other resources, including the efforts of other employees, capital and machinery, all of which was acquired and managed by the company. The company profits because the overall value generated by this system is larger than the sum of the value generated by any individual part. This isn't exploitation "by definition".
Hm... abject terror of homelessness.
When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.
Never stop learning, folks.
Since he's dead and not able to spend your book sales money on booze and horses, he'd probably be ok with you just reading his stuff online for free[0]. He is also great to listen to, there are a lot of recordings of his readings that you can find in the usual places. The poems are filled with a kind of beautiful carnage which contrasts the even tone of his delivery. Like, "Yeah, that crazy shit happened but so what?"
One of my favorites as a teaser to start with:
[0] http://www.poemhunter.com/charles-bukowski/poems/p.s. I can't speak for the quality of that site, you may have better luck elsewhere. When I looked up Rain all I got was the first line, so it's possible that other poems have errors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8KJiay6EI0
Side opinion: If you consume content only by people who are perfect (which really means follow your ethical system, your values), your content sources are going to be incredibly narrow. Also, because I have to make it crystal clear. I am not advocating kicking anyone. I just think that him committing something that I disagree with doesn't necessarily mean that his ideas aren't worth thinking about.
Are your questions anything other than pointlessly flippant?
Fiance: I am and will continue to sleep with other men.
Bukowski: You fing w*re [kicks].
Relationships are hard. While I don't agree with physical or verbal abuse, I think in this case Fiance probably hurt Bukowski more with her words than he did with his kick. It certainly didn't seem like he was kicking her because he "thought it was funny to kick women".
I'm totally against _any_ type of violence. But I've met and studied enough people who carry around a lifetime of mental illnesses caused verbal violence (esp. at a young age) to be able to say that one is worse than the other.
So you do agree with physical abuse. According to you, if your partner says something that upsets you, its totally OK to hit them. That is domestic abuse 101.
That's absurd. Where did I say "if your partner says something that upsets you, it's totally OK to hit them"?
I stated that:
a) Bukowski's fiance probably hurt Bukowski (by stating that she cheats on him) more than he did by kicking her.
b) It didn't seem like his reasons for kicking her were because he "thought it was funny to kick women."
Please read more carefully before you troll me, sir.
Why would that be relevant whatsoever to why someone kicks their partner? You said you don't agree with abuse as a preface and then immediately put physical abuse on the level with having your feelings hurt by something someone said.
I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been, but these kinds of statements happen all the time as a way to create a justification for the abuse inflicted on someone. It's not only abusers that do this, but people that are friends and acquaintances of both the abuser and abused.
Couples should figure out where they stand on that, before they resort to kicking.
She seemed to be straight up honest about that fact she didn't want a monogamous relationship, where is the abuse of trust in that?
1. I stated that I don't agree with abuse (physical or emotional).
2. I stated that in this case I thought the emotional abuse Bukowski's fiance inflicted on Bukowski was worse than the physical abuse he inflicted on her. That's my opinion. I think the way that she casually taunted him with her infidelity is _serious_ abuse. The kick is also terribly abusive.
I don't know all the facts, only what I saw in the video. I don't know if Bukowski went on to be a serial abuser or not, but that's not relevant to what happened in the video, which is the subject of this discussion.
You say: "I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been" - the answer is yes. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on by someone you're in love with.
How exactly is being honest about not wanting and not committing to a monogamous relationship on an equal playing field as getting hit? Moreover, even if you considered that verbally and/or emotionally abusive, that in no way justifies hitting someone.
> I don't know if Bukowski went on to be a serial abuser or not, but that's not relevant to what happened in the video, which is the subject of this discussion.
If Bukowski was a serial abuser, it is most certainly 100% relevant to the video in question. Domestic abuse isn't about a single incident, its about a continuum of behavior and events.
> You say: "I don't know if you yourself has been in an abuse relationship or know anyone that has been" - the answer is yes. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on by someone you're in love with.
I have, but hitting someone and being cheated on are not even remotely on the same playing field. In fact, it is a common tactic for abusers to accuse or blame partners for the abuse by insinuating or referring to actual past instances of cheating.
Hey man, I think we've covered some interesting ground here, but I think we just have to agree to disagree. I certainly don't think that cheating should be punished with physical abuse. However, I do think that the cheating on someone who you're engaged to and clearly expects monogamy is worse than hitting someone once. I just do.
Also, let's not forget that, whilst unacceptable, the kick was solicited by her admission of infidelity, whereas the infidelity is seemingly unsolicited.
Cheating on someone is a violation of that person's trust. Hitting your partner is violation of their physical integrity.
> Also, let's not forget that, whilst unacceptable, the kick was solicited by her admission of infidelity, whereas the infidelity is seemingly unsolicited.
What is the point of making this statement if not to excuse her getting hit or to make her getting hit seem like "she was asking for it"?
And I have to remember: that's just this thread, this thread will pass. It's Friday. I'm in a decent mood. Let's find something to eat, start thinking about what I will work on today.
But this crap still bothers me. It drags an otherwise nice discussion about good art into the gutter of reactionary judgements. A lot of really good artists had/have problems, but that doesn't discount their work.
Let's throw out all of human history and art and listen to the pious, sniveling PC morons of the last 10 years. That is the modern world for ya.
[1] http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html
Careful... http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
You do realize that this ignorant, reactionary stance invalidates the work of practically everyone ever, yes?
EDIT: If you're going to downvote someone's comment please have the guts to make an argument.
Would it be more tolerable to you if he were kicking a man?
There's a whole stack of comment below on judging him-as-a-person - but if you read widely you'll be well aware that many books are worth reading despite the character flaws of their authors.
I figure this being trapped is a sentiment a lot of people share, although I know of a significant minority of people who enjoy their jobs and lives, even after 30 years of "paycheck slavery".
The whole story reminds me of the song Factory by Bruce Springsteen.