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If you understand it this way, then why wouldn't my original example be sufficient? The incentive structure might be really bad, but once you start starving you
by danbruc 9y ago
If you understand it this way, then why wouldn't my original example be sufficient? The incentive structure might be really bad, but once you start starving you should certainly consider working again. Actually it seems almost everything would be workable in this way. Unless you structure a system in a way that it is simply unable to produce the required goods and services or makes access to them impossible for at least some, then at some ultimate point life threatening forces will set the incentives.
In reality, I guess, people would just overthrow your shitty system or circumvent it with black markets. So after thinking a bit longer about this, the requirements given in the initial comment seem not to be as straight forward as they may appear at first. What does sustainable mean? Is it sustainable if we make use of hunger to convince people to work? Is it implementable at the current population level if it entails something that the current population would never accept, say for ideological or religious reasons?
- dllthomas 9y ago> once you start starving you should certainly consider working again Free-rider problem, and the black (or gray) market. If all the value I capture from working is one/population of the value I produce, there are probably other things I can do (in an environment with a population bigger than "really small village") that will do substantially more to improve my circumstances, whether legal or not (and some things are bound to be legal - consider a kind of analog of the "man who marries his housekeeper" objection to GDP). And when people are desperate, they are more likely to focus on the things that will most improve their circumstance (especially in the shortest term).