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By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job? What we do want, basically a
by gpm 7y ago
By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job?
What we do want, basically always, is for the "average" person to work. And we want that because if most people aren't working we stop producing enough food and other goods/services and we all suffer for it. That's as true now as ever.
The government handing out money doesn't create food, or tractors, or houses, or nails, or clothing, and so on and so forth. It helps continue the distribution of the goods we do have in the short term, due to how we choose who to give goods to (i.e. selling them to people with money), but without people directly creating goods or indirectly creating value to sell to other people for goods (the other people being in other countries that are still producing goods) we will run out in short order.
- lmm 7y agoYou're putting the cart before the horse. We want to keep everyone in reasonable comfort. A certain amount of work is necessary for that. But it's probably a lot less than half of society doing 40-hour weeks.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIt seems to me like the minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it. The economy is what produces all the goods and services we enjoy in the first place. Some restrictions may be worth the cost, but the idea of finding broad sections of business activity that can be shut down without discomfort seems unrealistic.
- Super_Jambo 7y agoIf we made it our goal? If all our technological effort went into automating away drudgery? If all our persuasive marketing was not driving ever more consumption but making the simplest and cheapest lifestyle changes to improve our happiness? Sure.
- nostrademons 7y agoYou underestimate how many people are "employed" in making their boss feel powerful and their customers feel special. Or how many people are employed in ensuring that folks working for competitors are unable to sell their products. Most of these are white-collar office workers rather than "essential" workers, but there's still a massive amount of waste that comes from people playing financial or competitive games rather than directly contributing to their customers' well-being.
- gpm 7y agoThe shutdown isn't preferentially impacting those people though. If we could wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste we obviously should (shutdown or no shutdown), but we can't. Or at least that magic wand probably costs more resources enforcing it than those people consume. When GP says "minimum economy to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" I imagine they mean "the minimum portion of our economy that we can choose to restart to maintain our standard of living would necessarily be all of it" - because we don't have the knob to chose to restart only the good parts.
- lmm 7y agoWhen the UK went on a 3-day week in the 1970s, productivity was 97% of normal. I'm hopeful that the crisis could help unblock the shift towards part-time working and/or ensure that the protections that full-time workers get are extended to part-time and gig-economy workers. Right now there's a regulatory cliff that strongly incentivises people to work at least 30 hours/week at a single job rather than working the most productive hours or combination of jobs, and a business-social norm that prioritises spending 40 hours/week in the office over doing productive work. The former is a knob that we can turn; the latter is not entirely under conscious control, but is one of those things that's likely to shift suddenly once enough pressure has built up.
- luckylion 7y agoWhat's included in "reasonable comfort"? All the modern stuff or 10sqm at 18°C and 2500 calories per day per person?
- bluGill 7y agoI noticed that you didn't define reasonable comfort. However that definition is critical before we can think about how much work must be done to create it. A king in 1100 would have a different definition from his peasants. There are people living in mud huts today, and others in slums: both would give different answers. 180 years ago you were medically better off not going to the doctor, today I'd count ability to see a doctor as part of reasonable comfort. I know people who think they can't live if their car is more than 3 years old, and people who was excited to afford a 15 year old used car.
- JadeNB 7y ago> By this argument nobody ever wants to work. If you hit the lottery in normal times would you continue to work at your current job? The first sentence is not true in the universal generality stated. I know that it's not your main point, and I know that most people don't have the luxury that I do, but I am a teacher and a researcher, and I would absolutely keep doing both no matter how much money I had. (I hope I'll be able to keep teaching; my university's not so big.) (The only effect of having more money would be that I would replace grant-writing with periodically sending off handsomely calligraphed letters to funding agencies saying "Can't be arsed. Sorry!")
- gpm 7y agoYeah, I should have said almost nobody. Obviously there are some exceptions. Most astronauts, many professors, some CEOs, a few really lucky people working in companies...