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Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. -- John Maynard Keynes [0] My personal conspiracy theory is that the age of abundance has already come but we just don't know what to do with it other than keep working our BS jobs. [0] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

gervu 7y ago
We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.
- snikeris 7y ago
  > The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them. A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.
  - gervu 7y ago
    Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply. But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter. It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it. Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.
    - snikeris 7y ago
      No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.
      - gervu 7y ago
        I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed. Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others. People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.
- wait-a-minute 7y ago
  Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected? https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty "In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17 On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
  - gervu 7y ago
    The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced. I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.
    - wait-a-minute 7y ago
      The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet. So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game. Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.
dangerface 7y ago
We live in an abundance of want, we work to fulfil these pointless desires, but our basic needs (shelter, water, food) we keep limited in order to control people. Our basic needs come from the land which has not increased, genetic modification promises abundance of food but in reality has only been used to copyright and control food production. > The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. Do dogs think of their masters in this way? We know what happens to dogs that don't want to live out of their masters hand, they are put down. Will the same thing happen to humans without masters?
simplecomplex 7y ago
By definition if person A pays person B for something, person A values that something. By definition a job is not meaningless or without value. David Graeber‘s “bullshit jobs” betrays an ignorance of basic economics, and an understanding of what a job is, what trade is, the fact that people have different preferences and values, etc. The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced from reality.
- jlokier 7y ago
  Meaningfulness of work is not transitive. Typically person A pays _someone else's money_ to person B, and the someone else (person C) isn't around to pay attention to the details. I think that makes all the difference, especially when it's iterated over many layers of indirection. A is in some sense a custodian of what person C values, but that indirection means A is also optimising to keep A in a job without distracting too much from the joy of running a fiefdom, hiding the fact they don't really know what they are doing, etc. So A is paying B for what A thinks looks good enough to C, not necessarily what C would actually value if they understood what was going on. Let's suppose that indirection only adds a tiny amount of BS, say B is doing 10% BS work to satisfy A's misguided impulses (using C's money not A's), and 90% what C values. Then add a full economy. Now B is paying D using money they got from A, who got it from C. B is optimising to keep B in a job, so they try to do things that look good to A, while avoiding too much effort for B. To keep ths model simple, let's say the BS adds up and C's money ends up paying for D to do 20% BS work and 80% what C values. But it's all in a good cause, as far as C knows, this is great stuff - literally, the best money can buy. Throw in a few more layers of indirection and the BS compounds. Of course the world isn't that simple. By your definition, D's work is all meaningfully valuable to B, B's work is all meaninfully valuable to A, and A's work is all meaningfully valuable to C. So this does not mean people pay other people for no _local_ reason. But it's not transitive. C's money may be paying for D to do work that is not meaningfully valuable to C, despite everyone in the chain providing value to each other. So is it BS work or isn't it? My take is that a significant fraction of work is BS when viewed from a wider perspective: what does this work do for society, people more broadly; yet at the same time, it is much more useful when viewed looking at neighbouring relationships, close up. After all, a job helping someone else keep their job is of immense personal value to the latter person, so that's a factor in how they allocate their ability to spend other people's money. Since "helping someone else keep a job" is highly valued by those people whose jobs are kept, it's almost inevitable that a big feedback system emerges in which a significant fraction of all work paid for is for the purpose of keeping people in jobs.

gervu 7y ago

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

snikeris 7y ago
> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them. A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.
- gervu 7y ago
  Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply. But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter. It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it. Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.
  - snikeris 7y ago
    No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.
    - gervu 7y ago
      I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed. Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others. People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.
wait-a-minute 7y ago
Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected? https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty "In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17 On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
- gervu 7y ago
  The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced. I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.
  - wait-a-minute 7y ago
    The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet. So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game. Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.

dangerface 7y ago

We live in an abundance of want, we work to fulfil these pointless desires, but our basic needs (shelter, water, food) we keep limited in order to control people. Our basic needs come from the land which has not increased, genetic modification promises abundance of food but in reality has only been used to copyright and control food production. > The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. Do dogs think of their masters in this way? We know what happens to dogs that don't want to live out of their masters hand, they are put down. Will the same thing happen to humans without masters?

simplecomplex 7y ago

By definition if person A pays person B for something, person A values that something. By definition a job is not meaningless or without value. David Graeber‘s “bullshit jobs” betrays an ignorance of basic economics, and an understanding of what a job is, what trade is, the fact that people have different preferences and values, etc. The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced from reality.

jlokier 7y ago
Meaningfulness of work is not transitive. Typically person A pays _someone else's money_ to person B, and the someone else (person C) isn't around to pay attention to the details. I think that makes all the difference, especially when it's iterated over many layers of indirection. A is in some sense a custodian of what person C values, but that indirection means A is also optimising to keep A in a job without distracting too much from the joy of running a fiefdom, hiding the fact they don't really know what they are doing, etc. So A is paying B for what A thinks looks good enough to C, not necessarily what C would actually value if they understood what was going on. Let's suppose that indirection only adds a tiny amount of BS, say B is doing 10% BS work to satisfy A's misguided impulses (using C's money not A's), and 90% what C values. Then add a full economy. Now B is paying D using money they got from A, who got it from C. B is optimising to keep B in a job, so they try to do things that look good to A, while avoiding too much effort for B. To keep ths model simple, let's say the BS adds up and C's money ends up paying for D to do 20% BS work and 80% what C values. But it's all in a good cause, as far as C knows, this is great stuff - literally, the best money can buy. Throw in a few more layers of indirection and the BS compounds. Of course the world isn't that simple. By your definition, D's work is all meaningfully valuable to B, B's work is all meaninfully valuable to A, and A's work is all meaningfully valuable to C. So this does not mean people pay other people for no _local_ reason. But it's not transitive. C's money may be paying for D to do work that is not meaningfully valuable to C, despite everyone in the chain providing value to each other. So is it BS work or isn't it? My take is that a significant fraction of work is BS when viewed from a wider perspective: what does this work do for society, people more broadly; yet at the same time, it is much more useful when viewed looking at neighbouring relationships, close up. After all, a job helping someone else keep their job is of immense personal value to the latter person, so that's a factor in how they allocate their ability to spend other people's money. Since "helping someone else keep a job" is highly valued by those people whose jobs are kept, it's almost inevitable that a big feedback system emerges in which a significant fraction of all work paid for is for the purpose of keeping people in jobs.