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The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off. So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_socialcapital.html https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...) Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.

deadA1ias 7y ago
This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.
petra 7y ago
The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees. Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully. But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable. So why won't this work in the general economy ?
- perfmode 7y ago
  the command structure consists of lifers.
- sooheon 7y ago
  A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.
- devcpp 7y ago
  I can tell you that I gave my best during my 5 years at the IDF solely because I knew how well I would be paid afterwards if I did well, and I got directly hired at a FAANG. I can say the same about almost anyone I've known during my service across all programming units and beyond. Even the ones who knew they would stay did it for the chance to become Lt. Colonel and then director afterwards as a civilian. As for the ones claiming to be motivated by patriotism, they too usually ended up pursuing more lucrative venues. As for IDF jobs with less potential, they are usually accomplished by people with fewer ambitions doing much less than their best and placed there because of that (think of military HR, secretaries, nurses, cleaners). In short, there are no surprises. The Israeli military service is just a minor inconvenience in the path of ambition that is fueled by the capitalist spirit of the general economy, rather than being a replacement for it.
  - petra 7y ago
    Of course, today's context is capitalism, so it motivates many. But there are other ways to motivate people. If we're talking about a different , more utopian world, shouldn't we consider those ?
    - harimau777 7y ago
      What alternative do you suggest? The alternatives that I can think of: Enjoying the work and similar motivations: This tends to only apply to certain jobs. In addition, just because I'm intrinsically motivated to work on programming, for example, that doesn't mean that I'm motivated to program the things that society wants me to. A sense of duty: I think this motivation tends to have limitations and is likely hard to achieve consistently without propaganda, nationalism, or a state religion. Social status: Call me cynical, but I think this only works if someone can use their social status to get the things they want; in which case it doesn't seem that different from capitalism.
      - petra 7y ago
        In the old Jewish tradition, religious studies gave people high status, but also, because of the culture, were considered very valuable. This meant that those who we're good religious students(a life long pursuit, and not financially rewarding) married the most desired women. And that's just on culture. So maybe there are ways to cretae a motivating culture .
imgabe 7y ago
We are not in a static equilibrium. I don't think anyone believes we have reached an ideal state of technology where we don't need to progress any further. People who are not producing things that are immediately useful can be working to improve processes for building things, inventing new things, doing basic research, and supporting people who do that. There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary. It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
"The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals" No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it. Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are? This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology. And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential. Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.
- 0815test 7y ago
  That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin. You could reduce that work quite a bit with very little overall effect. In fact, this could even increase total product since the unskilled do tend to be heavily liquidity- and risk-constrained, so freeing up some time and effort on their part (without the stress of involuntary unemployment!) would significantly incent them to do such things as retraining, starting businesses, entering formal education etc. etc. This is a major argument for UBI, in fact - which would work a lot better than cutting working time across the board by fiat!
  - pascalxus 7y ago
    There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation
    - 0815test 7y ago
      "Vast oversupply"? Wage levels/compensating differentials say otherwise. Plenty of highly-skilled (even STEM) workers are non-engineers, and they get high wages.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Not in, to pick an arbitrary example, biotech.
perfunctory 7y ago
I am not really sure I understand what you are trying to say. 40 is not a magic number. Just like we once standardised workweek to be 40 hours, we can now (re)standardise it to be 32, or 16. Why not. I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's global corruption index.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    The WBO's global corruption index surely fails to take into account inter-national corruption. That corrupt resource extraction requires people outside the country interested in purchasing the outputs.
brighter2morrow 7y ago
This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.
- pm90 7y ago
  I didn't truly understand how powerfully demotivating bad coworkers can be until I actually experienced them. Good coworkers are encouraged and inspired when you do great work, or create automation that saves time and do more. Bad coworkers get jealous and feel threatened. if you're the kind of person who generally like to avoid conflict (most geeks fit this category), that alone is a powerful de-motivator .
jandrewrogers 7y ago
To rephrase: Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon. This leads to the following conundrum: If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor. Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  Forcing hour cuts would seem to me to have more unintended consequences than sat UBI policies.
- deleted 7y ago
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- petra 7y ago
  The assumption that highly skilled jobs are harder to automate may turn out as wrong. Also, many given the right augmentation tools, the training time for highly skilled jobs may be much shorter. Doctors(but maybe not neurosuregeons) is such case, because of regulation. Nurses , with some training and tools could replace many. But this could be true for other professions.
- Retric 7y ago
  We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does. The US labor market only really has shortages by design.
nerdponx 7y ago
The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). Citation needed?
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist. Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else. We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.
- throwayEngineer 7y ago
  Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part. I can teach anyone how to clean a mold. I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold. And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs
  - Avshalom 7y ago
    the appearance of disconnect thatfrenchguy is talking about is the idea that designing the mold is the actual output of society despite the fact that designing the mold no matter how few people can do it is completely useless without a massive web of interconnected labor that, yes anyone can do but, must done in order for society to actually output anything. It's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers who think they few highly skilled individuals are the engine of the world.
    - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
      That was the idea I was trying to convey, albeit said in a much better way thank you :-).
hedvig 7y ago
I agree. In that there are still U.S. fortunes that originate from slave ownership that have not been reciprocated
mrob 7y ago
Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person. There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority. Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy. This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?
- neilwilson 7y ago
  "and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. " The trouble with that is that there is a fallacy of composition there. The only thing you can have in that system is more money. You can't have more stuff because by definition there is no more stuff being added to the pubic value pool. And if you have more money, but the same amount of stuff, then all that happens is prices go up. Unless you believe more people than now value money for its own sake. Trying to hide a transfer using a money illusion only works for so long. Then people work out they are being fiddled and have the system shut down politically. Which is historically what has happened in every single case it has been tried. Alms to the poor is resented not just by those forced to provide the alms but by the poor themselves who resent being patronised and seen as useless. Such systems are generally put forward by those who believe they can value signal to their peers by being the ones handling out the alms.
eevilspock 7y ago
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth) That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them. Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics. Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  > pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage Already doing most of this, so... if I start picking my fruit (and vegetables) and learn to drive a garbage truck, what do I get in return?
doboyy 7y ago
The definition of a highly skilled worker kind of hinges on the fact that there are few. If everyone was skilled then we'd raise the bar. Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.
iamnothere 7y ago
Or, perhaps those people could be rewarded in proportion to the value they deliver compared to others. You could then choose to live simply (but with life's essentials), working less, or alternatively you could work hard to obtain prestige and money. You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession. So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.
badrabbit 7y ago
> But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off. Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward. It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts. Does this simply not work at scale?
scottlocklin 7y ago
> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I didn't read it as Google employees are productive while $othercorp employees are not. Even within google, things like Price's Law apply. Essentially half of all productivity is accomplished by the square root of the workers. So if Google has 10k developers. 100 of those developers are producing half of the value. The other 9,900 work together to produce the other half. https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/ https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    I used the example of Google because it is a particularly productive company on a per-employee basis for a large company in a way that can be measured. Not that I think Google is awesome: I think they should be broken up, and its employees should consider their life choices that they continue to work for the Great Satan. FWIIW they have more like 100,000 employees. The older I get, the less I believe in crap like Price's law. It sure seems like this in large and old organizations, but I can never point to the actually productive people. Some people appear to do nothing in a large group, but the group then falls apart when they leave/retire. In smaller groups, it definitely, trivially doesn't work like this.
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hurryskurry 7y ago
Can you provide actual sources to support the claim that a very small number of people are responsible for output?
rayiner 7y ago
> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.) Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)
- Conjoiner 7y ago
  Growing Bureaucracy https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924028-Figure1-thumb.jpg https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924...
kadendogthing 7y ago
How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged. That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.
llamaz 7y ago
This is just Ayn Randian reactionary propaganda, a society based on these hateful ideas is not one I would want to live in.

deadA1ias 7y ago

This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.

petra 7y ago

The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees. Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully. But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable. So why won't this work in the general economy ?

perfmode 7y ago
the command structure consists of lifers.
sooheon 7y ago
A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.
devcpp 7y ago
I can tell you that I gave my best during my 5 years at the IDF solely because I knew how well I would be paid afterwards if I did well, and I got directly hired at a FAANG. I can say the same about almost anyone I've known during my service across all programming units and beyond. Even the ones who knew they would stay did it for the chance to become Lt. Colonel and then director afterwards as a civilian. As for the ones claiming to be motivated by patriotism, they too usually ended up pursuing more lucrative venues. As for IDF jobs with less potential, they are usually accomplished by people with fewer ambitions doing much less than their best and placed there because of that (think of military HR, secretaries, nurses, cleaners). In short, there are no surprises. The Israeli military service is just a minor inconvenience in the path of ambition that is fueled by the capitalist spirit of the general economy, rather than being a replacement for it.
- petra 7y ago
  Of course, today's context is capitalism, so it motivates many. But there are other ways to motivate people. If we're talking about a different , more utopian world, shouldn't we consider those ?
  - harimau777 7y ago
    What alternative do you suggest? The alternatives that I can think of: Enjoying the work and similar motivations: This tends to only apply to certain jobs. In addition, just because I'm intrinsically motivated to work on programming, for example, that doesn't mean that I'm motivated to program the things that society wants me to. A sense of duty: I think this motivation tends to have limitations and is likely hard to achieve consistently without propaganda, nationalism, or a state religion. Social status: Call me cynical, but I think this only works if someone can use their social status to get the things they want; in which case it doesn't seem that different from capitalism.
    - petra 7y ago
      In the old Jewish tradition, religious studies gave people high status, but also, because of the culture, were considered very valuable. This meant that those who we're good religious students(a life long pursuit, and not financially rewarding) married the most desired women. And that's just on culture. So maybe there are ways to cretae a motivating culture .

imgabe 7y ago

We are not in a static equilibrium. I don't think anyone believes we have reached an ideal state of technology where we don't need to progress any further. People who are not producing things that are immediately useful can be working to improve processes for building things, inventing new things, doing basic research, and supporting people who do that. There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary. It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

"The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals" No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it. Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are? This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology. And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential. Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.

0815test 7y ago
That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin. You could reduce that work quite a bit with very little overall effect. In fact, this could even increase total product since the unskilled do tend to be heavily liquidity- and risk-constrained, so freeing up some time and effort on their part (without the stress of involuntary unemployment!) would significantly incent them to do such things as retraining, starting businesses, entering formal education etc. etc. This is a major argument for UBI, in fact - which would work a lot better than cutting working time across the board by fiat!
- pascalxus 7y ago
  There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation
  - 0815test 7y ago
    "Vast oversupply"? Wage levels/compensating differentials say otherwise. Plenty of highly-skilled (even STEM) workers are non-engineers, and they get high wages.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Not in, to pick an arbitrary example, biotech.

perfunctory 7y ago

I am not really sure I understand what you are trying to say. 40 is not a magic number. Just like we once standardised workweek to be 40 hours, we can now (re)standardise it to be 32, or 16. Why not. I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?

brighter2morrow 7y ago
No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's global corruption index.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  The WBO's global corruption index surely fails to take into account inter-national corruption. That corrupt resource extraction requires people outside the country interested in purchasing the outputs.

brighter2morrow 7y ago

This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.

pm90 7y ago
I didn't truly understand how powerfully demotivating bad coworkers can be until I actually experienced them. Good coworkers are encouraged and inspired when you do great work, or create automation that saves time and do more. Bad coworkers get jealous and feel threatened. if you're the kind of person who generally like to avoid conflict (most geeks fit this category), that alone is a powerful de-motivator .

jandrewrogers 7y ago

To rephrase: Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon. This leads to the following conundrum: If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor. Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

SubiculumCode 7y ago
Forcing hour cuts would seem to me to have more unintended consequences than sat UBI policies.
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petra 7y ago
The assumption that highly skilled jobs are harder to automate may turn out as wrong. Also, many given the right augmentation tools, the training time for highly skilled jobs may be much shorter. Doctors(but maybe not neurosuregeons) is such case, because of regulation. Nurses , with some training and tools could replace many. But this could be true for other professions.
Retric 7y ago
We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does. The US labor market only really has shortages by design.

nerdponx 7y ago

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist. Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else. We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.

throwayEngineer 7y ago
Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part. I can teach anyone how to clean a mold. I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold. And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs
- Avshalom 7y ago
  the appearance of disconnect thatfrenchguy is talking about is the idea that designing the mold is the actual output of society despite the fact that designing the mold no matter how few people can do it is completely useless without a massive web of interconnected labor that, yes anyone can do but, must done in order for society to actually output anything. It's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers who think they few highly skilled individuals are the engine of the world.
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    That was the idea I was trying to convey, albeit said in a much better way thank you :-).

hedvig 7y ago

I agree. In that there are still U.S. fortunes that originate from slave ownership that have not been reciprocated

mrob 7y ago

Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person. There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority. Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy. This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?

neilwilson 7y ago
"and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. " The trouble with that is that there is a fallacy of composition there. The only thing you can have in that system is more money. You can't have more stuff because by definition there is no more stuff being added to the pubic value pool. And if you have more money, but the same amount of stuff, then all that happens is prices go up. Unless you believe more people than now value money for its own sake. Trying to hide a transfer using a money illusion only works for so long. Then people work out they are being fiddled and have the system shut down politically. Which is historically what has happened in every single case it has been tried. Alms to the poor is resented not just by those forced to provide the alms but by the poor themselves who resent being patronised and seen as useless. Such systems are generally put forward by those who believe they can value signal to their peers by being the ones handling out the alms.

eevilspock 7y ago

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth) That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them. Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics. Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.

Viliam1234 7y ago
> pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage Already doing most of this, so... if I start picking my fruit (and vegetables) and learn to drive a garbage truck, what do I get in return?

doboyy 7y ago

The definition of a highly skilled worker kind of hinges on the fact that there are few. If everyone was skilled then we'd raise the bar. Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.

iamnothere 7y ago

Or, perhaps those people could be rewarded in proportion to the value they deliver compared to others. You could then choose to live simply (but with life's essentials), working less, or alternatively you could work hard to obtain prestige and money. You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession. So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.

badrabbit 7y ago

> But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off. Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward. It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts. Does this simply not work at scale?

scottlocklin 7y ago

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.

Consultant32452 7y ago
I didn't read it as Google employees are productive while $othercorp employees are not. Even within google, things like Price's Law apply. Essentially half of all productivity is accomplished by the square root of the workers. So if Google has 10k developers. 100 of those developers are producing half of the value. The other 9,900 work together to produce the other half. https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/ https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  I used the example of Google because it is a particularly productive company on a per-employee basis for a large company in a way that can be measured. Not that I think Google is awesome: I think they should be broken up, and its employees should consider their life choices that they continue to work for the Great Satan. FWIIW they have more like 100,000 employees. The older I get, the less I believe in crap like Price's law. It sure seems like this in large and old organizations, but I can never point to the actually productive people. Some people appear to do nothing in a large group, but the group then falls apart when they leave/retire. In smaller groups, it definitely, trivially doesn't work like this.

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hurryskurry 7y ago

Can you provide actual sources to support the claim that a very small number of people are responsible for output?

rayiner 7y ago

> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.) Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)

Conjoiner 7y ago
Growing Bureaucracy https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924028-Figure1-thumb.jpg https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924...

kadendogthing 7y ago

How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged. That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

llamaz 7y ago

This is just Ayn Randian reactionary propaganda, a society based on these hateful ideas is not one I would want to live in.