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>All the ones nobody wants. Which, in the end, is all of them. All this crap about "jobs, jobs, jobs" just papers over the fact that people don't like working
by eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>All the ones nobody wants.
Which, in the end, is all of them. All this crap about "jobs, jobs, jobs" just papers over the fact that people don't like working and never did like working, but treat working "full-time" as a hazing ritual for who gets to acquire certain levels of lifestyle.
Now, I'm sure someone somewhere is about to protest that they work very hard for their salary, and why should people who work less hard deserve as much, or even, if we count by the hour, more. But here's the facts: by the standards of the Industrial Revolution, a 12-16 hour workday, six days a week, is full time, so in fact you "hard workers" with your mere 50-60 hour weeks are only really working part-time -- such layabouts! Of course, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers usually worked something like 3-4 hours per day, seven days per week, so indeed you remain a very hard worker compared to them.
In the real world's real history, there have been wide variations in the quantity of work people do to earn their share of the available technological bounty, so arguing that the growth of technological gives us a moral obligation to intensify the economically-compelled workload of the average person... doesn't make much historical sense.
- escherize 11y agoActually your salary is not a reflection of how hard you work, but how much value you bring to your employer. Notice, an engineer working 35 hour weeks is conceivably a hell of a lot more valuable than a factory worker from the industrial revolution. This explains the disparity in wages.
- jlangenauer 11y agoAll of which is mediated by the difference in supply and demand for a particular skill. Employers would happily pay software developers minimum wage if they could get away with it.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoI completely agree that actual salaries are economically contingent. That's exactly what I'm trying to point out: there is no divine moral order for how much people should work or get paid, so when it becomes economically possible to move to a nicer location on the labor price-curve, where per-hour compensation goes up and hours can go down, we should do so.
- blumkvist 11y agoThat's easier said than done. Or rather impossible to do with such disparity between regions and the level of globalization we have.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoSpreading the wealth around between regions is another good way to spread the wealth around.
- blumkvist 11y agoBefore or after the morning feed of the unicorns shall we do that, Dorothy?
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoGlobalization seems to manage some amount of it all by itself.