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I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to n

by zanny 11y ago

I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers. Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce. But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a "problem" of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant. And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things I want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what you want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.

smaddox 11y ago
Indeed. I think this is a strong argument in favor of basic income. If the risk of an enterprise failing were separated from the risk of not being able to eat next week, then we would have far more entrepreneurs.
- zmmmmm 11y ago
  The paradox is that in many societies where something approximating basic income does exist, there is not a particularly great wealth of entrepreneurship. If anything I think there's a negative correlation.
  - zanny 11y ago
    The central consideration needs to be approximation. People like to compare US unemployment and welfare to UBI, or other social safety net programs, but in almost all these cases maintaining the income requires diligent screenings from state officials combined with proving a lack of income on your part. The temporary nature of all of them, and the cultural stigma of using them, also causes people to withdraw rather than participate in society. To be on welfare is to be wrong, and it is hard to operate from that mindset and be productive in your thoughts and endeavors. We need to see if these Canadian or Finnish proposals show fruit. Because one of the fundamental tenants of basic income - unconditionality, perpetuity - is the keystone of seeing economic growth through its deployment. It is also the halmark of decrying existent forms of welfare in how they incentivize docility and non-participation.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
I'm not sure it's an ... axiomatic ( meaning just made up out of whole cloth ) assumption that doing meaningful things for other people is part of a path to happiness. It may have the advantage of being true. It does not mean that it's the only condition for happiness ( it is necessary but not sufficient ) , but I know of no good assault on this idea. Adam Smith's "to be loved and to be lovely" exists, and is deeply imbedded. The advertising/media industrial complex problem is much more profound. But in order to propagate criticisms of it you'd sort of need the advertising/media industrial complex to get those ideas out. Still, Adam Curtis documentaries exist, the work of Marshall MacLuhan and Vance Packard and others exist. Of these, Adam Curtis seems to have taken the thing on most directly. And it was very funny watching "Mad Men" pull its punches.
- jernfrost 11y ago
  Media and advertising isn't quite the same. There is a clear value in people writing articles in newspapers about what is going on around us. Advertisement OTOH is frequently of little use. And it is perfectly possible to deal with advertisement/media through laws and regulations. E.g. I find that where I live in Norway, much of the informative and quality media exist almost exclusively due to government policy. Either you got the state run broadcaster or quality newspapers which get economic support from government. The quality newspaper typically don't make a lot of money because they are not shameless sell outs to advertisement and pop culture. Now for entertaining movies I am happy about the purely commercially driven TV channels, but it is also painstakingly clear that you can run well balanced and insightful journalism easily on primarily profit driven media.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    In the US, the giant of the newspaper industry was William Randolph Hearst, who used those papers mostly for personal gain. He foemented actual invasions ( mainly of Mexico, where he owned a ranch ). He'd damaged the reporting of American history in a manner to set back the literature for a century. He's set the stage for most of the nonsense American believe. Of course small papers can maintain some degree of integrity but there's very few voices in mass media that can. I am very happy if good journalism still exists in Norway. That's great. In America? I'm much less hopeful.
kiba 11y ago
The advertising industrial complex is paradoxically what employers are willing to pay for, but we humans don't need.
- jessedhillon 11y ago
  Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public aware of the existence of my very good product which nonetheless fills a niche that is well-occupied and not a very important part of people's lives (and therefore unlikely to be discussed unless immediately sought)? How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? This idea that advertising has no use and exists sort of parasitically is baffling to me. Even more baffling is that it's a meme which routinely nets all the upvotes on a place like HN -- where presumably the commenters are more likely to have actually created and sold valuable things, and therefore, one assumes, would have more than an academic appreciation for how business is done. It's been said many times before, but the level of discourse around here is retreating rapidly into equal parts academic idealism and Reddit-esque karma-driven populism.
  - wott 11y ago
    > Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? In each, all and every possible sense.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    You're conflating the idea of broadcasting and advertising. One is the other, but the other is not the one. Of course advertising has a use, but without advertising it's not like you would "have to research the 85 sushi restaurants" in your neighbourhood. Put it this way: I use adblock, I do not watch TV nor go to places which actively advertise. My life is fine, and I don't have to "actively research" anything unless I specifically want to. In fact, compared to people who don't avoid ads, I tend to spend my money a lot better... something to think about.
hitekker 11y ago
I am reminded of what George Orwelles wrote in "Down and out in Paris and London": > Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. EDIT: On a side note, I agreed halfway with what you're writing but the second half of your comment seems a bit more unclear/I'm not sure what you're discussing there. Could you clarify what you mean?
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless Brings to mind Graeber's article on "bullshit jobs". http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- hueving 11y ago
  You cannot pay a cost you impose on others with self induced suffering. I cannot steal and break my own toe to "pay it back". That justification is nonsense.
  - robbiep 11y ago
    I think you missed the point of the quote: Orwell is saying that to see someone suffer is in line with our ethics; someone who suffers can be ethically reasoned to have earned what dues come their way. Compare the beggar in orwell's quote, if you will, to the injured war veteran who benefits from a fundraiser. He has suffered, so we consider it worthy for him to benefit through community actions. Why is he worthy of the benefit? Because he suffered. I am not worthy because I have not suffered as he has. The beggar? Suffering. You are thinking very stringently if you are interpreting the quote as a 'literal' trade, broken toe for dinner for a week
mozumder 11y ago
> We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society Why do people say this, when they know full well that advertising drives people to buy things, and therefore, drive the economy?
- jcoffland 11y ago
  Because an economy driven mainly by consumerism is not sustainable in the long run. Such an economy requires unchecked growth and this falls apart once society starts consuming for the sake of consumption.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    The entire global economy since the beginning of time is about consuming. What makes you think it would fall apart at all?
    - floatrock 11y ago
      Exponential growth. There's a myth out there that we are unconstrained by physical resources. And it has largely been true "since the beginning of time". But that time is quickly coming to an end -- the next big generation shift will be the acceptance of a resource-constrained world imho. Look at meat consumption. It takes something like 10x as much energy to grow a calorie of meat as it does a calorie of vegetables. If the entire world (or even just the global middle class, if something like that exists) ate as much meat as the developed world, it would be an ecological catastrophe growing all that livestock, disposing of its waste, and fertilizing the grain needed to feed it. And guess what, as the populations of India and China are entering the middle class, they're adopting a taste for meat-heavy diets. Energy consumption per capita is a pretty good proxy for human development. Whether it's meat or our plastic lawn furniture that we consume from amazon, all of it takes energy to produce. In other words, consumption is another word for energy, and if even a sizable chunk of the world consumed as much as we do in the western world, it would require something like more energy than all proven oil reserves. Clearly that's not going to work. We can always hope for the deus ex machina ending and say that we'll find salvation in technological progress (whether it's an efficient way to store solar or figuring out fusion or an FTL drive top open up new worlds), but that requires a dangerous amount of hope. It's also the path of inaction -- wait for someone else to deliver salvation. More realistically, I think consumption is starting to hit physical resource constraints and is inflecting towards the top of the S-curve. The entire global economy since the beginning of time may have been about consuming, but that doesn't mean the party can continue.
Balgair 11y ago
Wow! Fantastic comment that I woefully can only upvote once. This is why I come to HN, for thinking like this. That said, I think you are totally wrong about this. Just look at surnames: Baker, Smith, Shoemaker, etc. The actual names of people and their families were completely centered around their employment, or more generally, what it was they did all day long. Yes, this was medieval Europe, and conditionals abound, but the same is true in many other cultures too. The surnames of Mehta or Poddar in India relate to accountants. More generally, you mention that people needing to do something for someone else is not what humans should do. I think this is totally false. Maybe not just 1 person/baron/emperor, but I certainly think people want to be useful to other people in their community. Ok, yes, this is a gaussian curve here, like so many other things, but I would like to think that at 1 std south people still want to help others as a natural condition for mankind. However, I do agree with you and Adam Smith that people should be mostly doing 'nothing' all day. Most of the work to feed and house people in 1st world countries is 'done.' We can easily give out the bare essentials for life, the issue is distribution, as is claimed by Minimum income folks. Though I agree with you in a mechanical sort of way, that is not the issues. The issue is emotions. Giving people free stuff is not 'fair' for most folk. And that emotional issue of fairness, something I think drives a lot of the reasons behind laws and politics, is the elephant in the room. The question quickly come out of 'why should I work if she gets free stuff all the same?' Do not underestimate the ability for people to 'game the system' either for simply the want to appear more well off than their noisy neighbors. Keeping up on the Jones's is why you see so many new iPhones in very poor areas. Overall, I think people exist on the bell-curve between selflessness and selfishness. Most folk are 1 std north or south of the average. The real questions are where is that mean relative to Jesus and the Devil and how wide is that std relative to that? Note: Also, time and again we are told that the standard of living here in the US is far too high for the whole planet to be able to live like us. Nearly all scientists worth listening to say that climate change is real and we have to do something about it. Weather we like it or not, the average living condition here in the US must fall to a level our planet can sustain. Possibly we are seeing this in action already.
- borvo 11y ago
  They're talking about consumption not standard of living. It's possible to imagine a future where everybody will get that superior standard of living but with far less consumption required to support it - innovation and creativity (and fewer wasteful wars) will deliver that future.

by zanny 11y ago

smaddox 11y ago

Indeed. I think this is a strong argument in favor of basic income. If the risk of an enterprise failing were separated from the risk of not being able to eat next week, then we would have far more entrepreneurs.

zmmmmm 11y ago
The paradox is that in many societies where something approximating basic income does exist, there is not a particularly great wealth of entrepreneurship. If anything I think there's a negative correlation.
- zanny 11y ago
  The central consideration needs to be approximation. People like to compare US unemployment and welfare to UBI, or other social safety net programs, but in almost all these cases maintaining the income requires diligent screenings from state officials combined with proving a lack of income on your part. The temporary nature of all of them, and the cultural stigma of using them, also causes people to withdraw rather than participate in society. To be on welfare is to be wrong, and it is hard to operate from that mindset and be productive in your thoughts and endeavors. We need to see if these Canadian or Finnish proposals show fruit. Because one of the fundamental tenants of basic income - unconditionality, perpetuity - is the keystone of seeing economic growth through its deployment. It is also the halmark of decrying existent forms of welfare in how they incentivize docility and non-participation.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

I'm not sure it's an ... axiomatic ( meaning just made up out of whole cloth ) assumption that doing meaningful things for other people is part of a path to happiness. It may have the advantage of being true. It does not mean that it's the only condition for happiness ( it is necessary but not sufficient ) , but I know of no good assault on this idea. Adam Smith's "to be loved and to be lovely" exists, and is deeply imbedded. The advertising/media industrial complex problem is much more profound. But in order to propagate criticisms of it you'd sort of need the advertising/media industrial complex to get those ideas out. Still, Adam Curtis documentaries exist, the work of Marshall MacLuhan and Vance Packard and others exist. Of these, Adam Curtis seems to have taken the thing on most directly. And it was very funny watching "Mad Men" pull its punches.

jernfrost 11y ago
Media and advertising isn't quite the same. There is a clear value in people writing articles in newspapers about what is going on around us. Advertisement OTOH is frequently of little use. And it is perfectly possible to deal with advertisement/media through laws and regulations. E.g. I find that where I live in Norway, much of the informative and quality media exist almost exclusively due to government policy. Either you got the state run broadcaster or quality newspapers which get economic support from government. The quality newspaper typically don't make a lot of money because they are not shameless sell outs to advertisement and pop culture. Now for entertaining movies I am happy about the purely commercially driven TV channels, but it is also painstakingly clear that you can run well balanced and insightful journalism easily on primarily profit driven media.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  In the US, the giant of the newspaper industry was William Randolph Hearst, who used those papers mostly for personal gain. He foemented actual invasions ( mainly of Mexico, where he owned a ranch ). He'd damaged the reporting of American history in a manner to set back the literature for a century. He's set the stage for most of the nonsense American believe. Of course small papers can maintain some degree of integrity but there's very few voices in mass media that can. I am very happy if good journalism still exists in Norway. That's great. In America? I'm much less hopeful.

kiba 11y ago

The advertising industrial complex is paradoxically what employers are willing to pay for, but we humans don't need.

jessedhillon 11y ago
Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public aware of the existence of my very good product which nonetheless fills a niche that is well-occupied and not a very important part of people's lives (and therefore unlikely to be discussed unless immediately sought)? How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? This idea that advertising has no use and exists sort of parasitically is baffling to me. Even more baffling is that it's a meme which routinely nets all the upvotes on a place like HN -- where presumably the commenters are more likely to have actually created and sold valuable things, and therefore, one assumes, would have more than an academic appreciation for how business is done. It's been said many times before, but the level of discourse around here is retreating rapidly into equal parts academic idealism and Reddit-esque karma-driven populism.
- wott 11y ago
  > Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? In each, all and every possible sense.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  You're conflating the idea of broadcasting and advertising. One is the other, but the other is not the one. Of course advertising has a use, but without advertising it's not like you would "have to research the 85 sushi restaurants" in your neighbourhood. Put it this way: I use adblock, I do not watch TV nor go to places which actively advertise. My life is fine, and I don't have to "actively research" anything unless I specifically want to. In fact, compared to people who don't avoid ads, I tend to spend my money a lot better... something to think about.

hitekker 11y ago

I am reminded of what George Orwelles wrote in "Down and out in Paris and London": > Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. EDIT: On a side note, I agreed halfway with what you're writing but the second half of your comment seems a bit more unclear/I'm not sure what you're discussing there. Could you clarify what you mean?

digi_owl 11y ago
> but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless Brings to mind Graeber's article on "bullshit jobs". http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hueving 11y ago
You cannot pay a cost you impose on others with self induced suffering. I cannot steal and break my own toe to "pay it back". That justification is nonsense.
- robbiep 11y ago
  I think you missed the point of the quote: Orwell is saying that to see someone suffer is in line with our ethics; someone who suffers can be ethically reasoned to have earned what dues come their way. Compare the beggar in orwell's quote, if you will, to the injured war veteran who benefits from a fundraiser. He has suffered, so we consider it worthy for him to benefit through community actions. Why is he worthy of the benefit? Because he suffered. I am not worthy because I have not suffered as he has. The beggar? Suffering. You are thinking very stringently if you are interpreting the quote as a 'literal' trade, broken toe for dinner for a week

mozumder 11y ago

> We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society Why do people say this, when they know full well that advertising drives people to buy things, and therefore, drive the economy?

jcoffland 11y ago
Because an economy driven mainly by consumerism is not sustainable in the long run. Such an economy requires unchecked growth and this falls apart once society starts consuming for the sake of consumption.
- mozumder 11y ago
  The entire global economy since the beginning of time is about consuming. What makes you think it would fall apart at all?
  - floatrock 11y ago
    Exponential growth. There's a myth out there that we are unconstrained by physical resources. And it has largely been true "since the beginning of time". But that time is quickly coming to an end -- the next big generation shift will be the acceptance of a resource-constrained world imho. Look at meat consumption. It takes something like 10x as much energy to grow a calorie of meat as it does a calorie of vegetables. If the entire world (or even just the global middle class, if something like that exists) ate as much meat as the developed world, it would be an ecological catastrophe growing all that livestock, disposing of its waste, and fertilizing the grain needed to feed it. And guess what, as the populations of India and China are entering the middle class, they're adopting a taste for meat-heavy diets. Energy consumption per capita is a pretty good proxy for human development. Whether it's meat or our plastic lawn furniture that we consume from amazon, all of it takes energy to produce. In other words, consumption is another word for energy, and if even a sizable chunk of the world consumed as much as we do in the western world, it would require something like more energy than all proven oil reserves. Clearly that's not going to work. We can always hope for the deus ex machina ending and say that we'll find salvation in technological progress (whether it's an efficient way to store solar or figuring out fusion or an FTL drive top open up new worlds), but that requires a dangerous amount of hope. It's also the path of inaction -- wait for someone else to deliver salvation. More realistically, I think consumption is starting to hit physical resource constraints and is inflecting towards the top of the S-curve. The entire global economy since the beginning of time may have been about consuming, but that doesn't mean the party can continue.

Balgair 11y ago

Wow! Fantastic comment that I woefully can only upvote once. This is why I come to HN, for thinking like this. That said, I think you are totally wrong about this. Just look at surnames: Baker, Smith, Shoemaker, etc. The actual names of people and their families were completely centered around their employment, or more generally, what it was they did all day long. Yes, this was medieval Europe, and conditionals abound, but the same is true in many other cultures too. The surnames of Mehta or Poddar in India relate to accountants. More generally, you mention that people needing to do something for someone else is not what humans should do. I think this is totally false. Maybe not just 1 person/baron/emperor, but I certainly think people want to be useful to other people in their community. Ok, yes, this is a gaussian curve here, like so many other things, but I would like to think that at 1 std south people still want to help others as a natural condition for mankind. However, I do agree with you and Adam Smith that people should be mostly doing 'nothing' all day. Most of the work to feed and house people in 1st world countries is 'done.' We can easily give out the bare essentials for life, the issue is distribution, as is claimed by Minimum income folks. Though I agree with you in a mechanical sort of way, that is not the issues. The issue is emotions. Giving people free stuff is not 'fair' for most folk. And that emotional issue of fairness, something I think drives a lot of the reasons behind laws and politics, is the elephant in the room. The question quickly come out of 'why should I work if she gets free stuff all the same?' Do not underestimate the ability for people to 'game the system' either for simply the want to appear more well off than their noisy neighbors. Keeping up on the Jones's is why you see so many new iPhones in very poor areas. Overall, I think people exist on the bell-curve between selflessness and selfishness. Most folk are 1 std north or south of the average. The real questions are where is that mean relative to Jesus and the Devil and how wide is that std relative to that? Note: Also, time and again we are told that the standard of living here in the US is far too high for the whole planet to be able to live like us. Nearly all scientists worth listening to say that climate change is real and we have to do something about it. Weather we like it or not, the average living condition here in the US must fall to a level our planet can sustain. Possibly we are seeing this in action already.

borvo 11y ago
They're talking about consumption not standard of living. It's possible to imagine a future where everybody will get that superior standard of living but with far less consumption required to support it - innovation and creativity (and fewer wasteful wars) will deliver that future.