We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. - Buckminster Fuller
One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage. - Buckminster Fuller
Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else).
Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work. Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.
Honestly, if you followed evolutionary biology we all should be working quite a bit less and producing way more art. The idea that people will fall into dissipation without work is supported by very little science, and certainly no biological science.
Human beings need missions, not labor, to be fulfilled. The market economy seems capable of only supporting a very narrow slice of mission oriented work, the rest does seem like drudgery to me.
I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.
Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).
Because nearly everyone wants to feel they're contributing to society in some way. I think we agree here. I'm not saying you need a horrendous office job.
Work is important but labor is not, so to speak.
I think people care less about contributing to society and more about having something meaningful to do.
Many jobs are quite meaningless, and the only reason people work them is because they have bills to pay.
On the other hand, creative people will find something meaningful to do that may or may not ever be a contribution to society.
Work is important because we value a high quality of life. Things like comfort and shelter and medicine and protection from violence and all of the other trappings of civilization never mind luxuries like cars, Internet, cell phones, etc. These things have never existed apart from work. I keep hearing about how awful capitalism is and how absurd and morally wrong it is for humans to need to work, but no one has offered a better solution (certainly nothing that bears up to a layman’s understanding of economics). Substantiate your claims about how “absurd” things are—articulate a system that can appropriately channel resources “where they really should go” (e.g., caregivers) better than capitalism (specifically what imbues your system with more moral authority than a market? If your system depends on a majority of voters feeling the same way as you, what happens when you can’t guarantee that invariant? What happens when you realize that voters and their representatives are even less efficient at allocating resources efficiently than a market? And how does your system guard against corruption better than capitalism?).
change netflix to gaming and you might be onto something
>if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else
If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high.
This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is visible.
Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.
Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".
Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.
I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.
"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set not by congress and not by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?
Indeed. Oxygen is very valuable too, but it should not be expensive for this reason alone. It's abundant, and therefore cheap, and that's a good thing.
Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.
Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an oversupply of teachers.
Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.
>Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility.
Public sector workers can leave for private wages, and for most comparable jobs, are paid similar wages, perhaps more so when adding benefits of most public sector jobs compared to volatility in private equivalents.
So maybe the wage is not the result of public artificial restriction, but of the value placed on the jobs themselves in the open job market.
Also not US teachers are among the highest paid in the world, certainly the OECD, likely because of Baumol's Cost Disease (which would imply US teachers are intrinsically overpaid, but receive the wages they do because schools must compete with outside even higher paying jobs to attract teachers). So perhaps it's not simply the US or public systems, but this is around the value on such skills worldwide.
So either the entire planet places similar utility on teaching as measured by pay, or the entire planet, public and private, has reached the same wrong conclusion.
In fact, many public sector jobs exist because they are too valuable (or difficult) for the market to pay. In the time before lighthouses were automated, try to calculate the value of the lighthouse keeper who prevented deaths and lost cargo.
I agree. And to be clear I think I think it would be an immediate catastrophe as parents would not be able to work as they would have to take care of their children. Teaching is obviously vastly more important than childcare but teachers on their undervalued salaries provide both of these salaries.
If parents did not have to work or could take their children to work, they could be both caregivers and teachers.
No, it wouldn't really be any sort of calamity. Online-Courses/tuitions/bootcamps/home-schooling will take the place of traditional teachers in no time assuming some overlord disappeared them.
I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If Uber disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.
Another problem with this line of reasoning is that people assume that they can always utilise 15m in a productive way or that not doing anything is not productive. How many times do you need a break everyday? How many times would a 15m break to relax and refocus or meditate actually benefit you rather than trying to force some work?
> I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If indoor plumbing disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.
Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.
False equivalence. Indoor plumbing is nothing like an app to call a taxi.
Also see both my points. You don’t know if their lives would get worse. You’ve just assumed that the main goal of everyone is to hyper optimise their lives.
Yes I do know their lives would get worse[1] and yes it is an equivalent. You think when indoor plumbing came around people weren't arguing how it was an unnecessary luxury and making people soft and how that wasted time walking to the outhouse builds character and refocuses the self and how we'd all be better off without it?
[1] Because they have said they do, repeatedly, with their wallets.
What exactly is overpriced about Uber? The drivers aren't making that much and despite Uber's cut they still aren't profitable
Because that core business isn't where all the money is going. The basic concept of software connecting buyers to sellers (riders to available drivers) is a simple software problem, easily solvable by a few guys and servers given time. Uber spends money on expansion, marketing and a constant game of legal stratego against any town/city/country that seems to get in its way. We are overpricing, over-rewarding, those companies who live to rise their stock price. We should be rewarding those companies whose continued existence is of the greatest benefit to society. That probably isn't Uber.
Why do you think caregivers, teachers, and social workers are undervalued? Last time I checked, care facilities, classrooms, and social centers were fully staffed. On what basis can you claim that their pay is too low? Who gets to decide the right salary? You? Why?
A particular job being important in aggregate does not entitle each individual who does that job to a salary higher than people who do some other job that might be less important in aggregate.
Oxygen is very important and it's free. Certain comic books are expensive despite being of very little importance to our survival. The value of a thing is the price of one additional unit of that thing, not some statement about the moral significance of all of that thing in aggregate.
Why do you get to say that working a "full time" job should not have to cover your full time living expenses?
Why are people entitled to a particular set of benefits in exchange for a particular time spent doing some activity? Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?
> Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?
Practically speaking, voters do because we live in a democracy.
It is perfectly fine for a society to decide "a full time job should have to pay enough to cover a person's full-time living expenses", to define all those terms reasonably, and presto enforce it as law.
It is also perfectly fine for the free market to decide this. This is society too and captures relative value far more effectively and adaptably than a fixed one-time vote.
The free market considers the monetary tradeoffs in this.
Comparing it to a holistic societal value (quality of life, family time, other non-monetary factors) is a disservice, that I believe negates the (subjective) "effective and adaptable" value measurement of the free market.
Otherwise you're just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value, which in many people's eyes is the dark/down side of capitalism and how we ended up here to begin with.
> just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value
What's wrong with that? Our resources are finite. Our attention is short. We have to prioritize society's investment. How can anyone decide on the relative priority of two things without casting them to some common unit? It's only when we describe people's lives in terms of dollars that we can make intelligent decisions about where to apply society's scarce resources.
This. All professions have relative economic value. The free market - a market without permanent subsidies, monopolies and correct application of import tax (to balance non-free foreign subsidies) is the best and most fair judge of this.
Not some social welfare activist or even some elected representative of the party in power.
(PS: I did not downvote you). People have the same rights. However, relative economic value is definitely different from person to person. Denying this is denying basic reality.
Taking an example from a parent post - caregivers do NOT have high relative economic value. Anyone over 18 can become a caregiver without even passing high school and become a certified home care aide. Enforcing a higher pay through law will is only likely to increase un-employment. The market on the other hand is self-correcting.
The federal government being the lender for loans has only lead to higher cost of loans and un-employed arts graduates who cannot get a job and cannot payback those loans. Without the federal government backing, those loans were un-likely to have been offered in the first place, unless there was current/future demand for arts graduates.
I strongly believe that most aspects of living (for people and communities as you put it) indeed need a dollar value otherwise un-realistic and un-workable economic expectations come into play.
We have seen this play out in the past with failed governments and we will continue to see this in the future.
> we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc),
Who is we? Who sets the price?
People obviously don’t see more value in teachers or caregivers, price should not be mandated by law
Prisons are arguably less important to society than education (since it represents the failing of citizens being productive members of society). However, prison expenditures were increasing three times faster than education from 1990 to 2016 [1]. Much of it going to corporately run prisons.
And given the marijuana legalization trend as of late, I really don't believe that people see the value of locking people up we are angry at. People we're afraid of, sure, that's a different story. But a non-violent marijuana offense shouldn't get a 15 year sentence.
Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/the-s...
I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society
But I agree that in most countries prisons are true hellholes
In the US laws mandate certain level of care, and government prefer to pay someone else than handle the costs: unions, pensions for those prison staff
> I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society.
That's part of how we got here. Prison is just one option. Fines and orders to curtail freedom is another. E.g. Court ordered monetary restitution and loss of one driver's license are examples.
Here's a short version of how we got here:
1. Make more crimes to felonies subject to incarceration.
2. Imprison more people.
3. Remove felon's right to vote to make change to the current system.
4. Build more prisons
5. Privatize the prisons because government needs so much more of them now.
6. The prison lobby now argues for more harsher sentences.
7. GOTO 1.
> Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.
Missed this one in my earlier comment
Wow
What about farmers, miners, bakers,..., surely they are more important than caregivers and teachers or social workers? This is a silly argument to assign value to a certain profession based on how one feels. And what do hunger-gatherer societies do when they run out of food for whatever reason. Do they just say, no our 20 hour quota was already fulfilled this week, we'll starve now. The a amount of work neccesery to enable our modern lifestyles today is sometimes unimaginable to a person who has everything brought to them.
> Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.
Yes, and in pretty much every conflict against hard working agricultural societies, they got wiped out.
Evolutionary biology can only tell us the bare minimum about what we need to survive as a species. If you want anything more than that (say for example, a cushy third-world quality of life), evolutionary biology is the wrong field (or rather, not the complete set of fields) to look at.
My mom and i were just discussing my dog's visit to the veterinarian. She said that her father would never have taken a dog to the vet for those symptoms, but my dog got a blood analysis and a stomach X-ray. I spent a lot of money on all this, which paid the vet and their staff and the lab and the equipment manufacturers. Conclusion: increased wealth creates increased opportunity to work.
Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health are involved.
At a political / social impact / behavioral hacking level, there's probably an argument to make near human grade medical services for domestic pets free, as it would likely assist with the reduction in human population growth (aside from companionship, etc.).
I am consistently amazed how cheap and fast medical services are in developing countries. The equipment costs so much less outside of western regulatory oversight, and to the consumer standard blood test batteries are often ~5-10 minutes and ~free.
> I am consistently amazed how cheap and fast medical services are in developing countries. The equipment costs so much less outside of western regulatory oversight, and to the consumer standard blood test batteries are often ~5-10 minutes and ~free.
This makes me wonder how much other countries indirectly benefit from the regulatory oversight that exists in the west. It's the regulatory oversight, compounded with capitalism, that produces medical equipment. Then the oversight over its usage probably adds to the cost of deploying the equipment.
Does the lack of, or reduced, latter oversight contribute in any major way to the pricing discrepancy for procedures for which that medical equipment is necessary?
We in the east are well aware that we benefit in some ways from the extremely risk averse regulators in the US and Europe and others. It's often explicitly acknowledged with labels like "treatment developed in the US" though it can also be hard to separate the real from the false claims of such.
On the other hand, not only does the east manufacture many of the pharmaceuticals sold in the west, it is a vast market which provides additional revenue with a convenient geographical separation which is difficult to arbitrage (Ibuprofen costs nothing in India compared to the US, but you don't see Indians flying to the US with suitcases of pills for sale).
> Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health is involved.
This is a common misconception of what healthcare services are. People pay more for unsafer cars every day or decide to travel by plane that carries life&death risks for the pleasures of tourism. Life is a currency we pay with anything, from eating garbage to smoking and drinking and fundamentally, taking risks.
Meh, I trust pilots to handle planes well.
That being said, I don't like commuting by bike because of all the dorks going 50-60mph in a 35mph area. Not worth it. Also makes you think twice before slamming the accelerator when I myself drive. Something like every 10mph faster you go equates to like 50% higher risk of fatality- and when your knees and back are the crumple zones, no thank you!
Risks are an inherent part of life. I've dealt with a popped lung before- likely because of athletic activities- and I wouldn't not do those because I might get hurt. If you don't take risks, are you really alive?
Of course. Thats why the whole line of "a healthcare provider can get your entire life's savings and future earning because otherwise you die" is an idea that doesn't make any sense in theory or in practice.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat. - Paul the Apostle
... via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
I've come to find comments like these ones very frustrating as an amateur economist. In the end, this idealization of how productivity should be used ends up being a proposal of political power: productivity should be what I think it should be, so we must collectively act as if it is.
Shouldn't you find the current state of things to be equally frustrating then? It's just another example of the same thing.
We never got to choose how our economic/productive output is valued or disposed of, we just were born into this highly unequal and unfair system and had to play along or die. I'd find that a lot more frustrating than the proposal that, if the technological and resource capacity exists to provide enough for all, it should be shared relatively evenly.
> We never got to choose how our economic/productive output is valued or disposed of,
Bastiat said it long ago: men have the tendency to overvalue their own work and diminish the work of others. There is no better system known to man to solve that issue than the free exchange and refusal of services between them.
When someone says that a farmer that can produce food for a thousand people thanks to productivity gains should mean that people eat for free, does he mean the farmer should not get paid, or does he mean that there should be no farmer? Clearly the idea that because productivity is up there is free labor is a fallacy.
While I wouldn't disagree with anything you have put forward here, I would assert that "free exchange" cannot really happen if there is massive wealth inequality. Private property will necessarily lead to labour exploitation that involves unequal circumstances and thus unequal terms of exchange.
> It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
What does that mean? Supporting all the rest at 1970 first world living standards? And how is that a fact exactly?
The one in ten thousand does not make that breakthrough alone either. They are "standing on the shoulders of giants" of the past and also relying on infrastructure, education, healthcare, social support, etc. that is provided by the broader community. Of course everyone should share directly (not in some "trickle down" way) in the fruits of such success -- they were all a part of nurturing it!
> broader community
And in most cases a broader community of people working jobs! Huh, turns out those jobs ARE useful. (Sorry in advance for sarcasm.)
The amazing thing about Bucky is that his insights are more applicable today than when he conceived them ~50+ years ago.
This was also popularly known only a few years back as 'On the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs'
Tell that to the 3 billion people who are just scraping by with no local government help.
Technological breakthroughs mean that goods become more affordable, not that the inventors must be punished by making them support people who aren't productive.
Well put. Also most of the commenters here don’t realize that people who have been unemployed for a while can’t just get to a regular job without a low wage job in between that helps to pay for some of the costs of going to school.
Also, wages in the low wage jobs ARE GOING UP, as mentioned throughout the comments
its not even going to school sometimes, often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation.
often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation.
I do a lot of hiring. You are correct and further - literally any gap at all is viewed as suspicious. And there aren't many reasonable explanations that help the situation.
I also do a lot of hiring, and can say that it's also NOT correct. We'll query it, but it's rarely a problem. Different companies have different process and expectations, so let's steer clear of absolute statements like "this is correct" and "this is not true" as it's unhelpful to folks in the situation. Generally speaking, if you have a gap, make sure to explain in a cover letter. These are important and can make the difference between a rejection from HR and being passed onto a hiring manager.
Edit: spelling
Curious to know how you would distinguish between unemployed, volunteer, and self-employed.
I must disagree, anecdotally.
I walked off one job, and went traveling for six months. Another job I was on the losing end of a political maneuver, and used my severance to take another six month sabbatical.
Each time I returned to the market I received 20%+ compensation over what I had before. The second time I was promoted into management with hiring authority.
Let me know who you turn away for gaps in their resume. Maybe I'll hire them. :-)
I too have found I get a significant salary bump with each job departure. But I have usually had either economic factors or 'sabatical' as a reasonable explanation.
Unrelated, but the cover letter is my least favorite part of job hunting, because I'm often hard pressed to explain why I want to work there beyond "you're hiring, I'm looking, and this job looks suitable for me, and at least mildly interesting".
So... "I gathered savings and wanted to rest for half a year" is suspicious?
Maybe I am misunderstanding here.
This is hopefully a specifically US thing, some companies' HR departments are extremely risk averse and will likely interpret that as you were in prison or rehab for six months.
I once, as an intern, had an HR assistant bring my application for a permanent position back to me because she wanted an explanation for why I was unemployed between June and August of the previous year (a year in which I was enrolled at a university.) I explained that I was in school and most companies don't hire people for only 3 months over the summer so I spent that time learning a programming language. She walked away looking annoyed.
Honestly, would have put 'Student at Blah' during those three months from there on.
Started a business that ultimately failed, consulting, taking a health break, there are plenty. Which field do you hire for? I’ve taken 2 years off before and didn’t have a bit of a problem getting back into my field.
Although I also perceive the same things I wonder if there is adequate incentive for the one to create something that provides for others
Simply taking their economic output is not incentive
Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software
Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2).
My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00.
When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia?
The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.
I posit that it only works when you use an oversimplified model of human behavior, rather than the messy truth that is humanity.
> My revenue for all
Your revenue may be, but people behind Gstreamer, Linux and other important serious opensource product do it for money (sometimes pretty big money, Linus has $2millions income).
> When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is looking for money constantly, the have sponsors, donators, without them it would cease to exist.
Also Wikipedia's quality often is pretty abysmal, especially when it's not in English.
> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.
Sure, let's suggest to abolish patent system and see how many fully self-actualized adults will oppose.
As someone who has done quite a bit of patentable work in the past 10 years, I would applaud abolishing patents.
Cryptography patents makes us all less secure, because nobody uses patented cryptography. It's a net-negative in my industry.
You'll mainly get opposition from people who own patents, not inventors.
You're talking about a niche of products with marginal cost = 0 for production, distribution.
Call me when you start building houses for free. ;-)
> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.
But for those who could be fully self actualized but arent yet and have to exchange time for food and shelter?
I had already covered that with the sentence that followed the one you quote-replied to.
To explain: I said it doesn't work with people who are X. Then I posited that it only works in condition Y. Y covers all cases, including non-X, and therefore answers your question (with respect to what I'd posit).
If your mental model of humanity is deeply flawed, you expect carrot-and-stick motivations to work. It doesn't matter if they're self-actualized.
If anyone is still confused, this might be worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivate...