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I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of

I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.

zelos 5y ago
"I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure." (Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons)
oh-4-fucks-sake 5y ago
[I think psychologists have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magical-chart/ https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magic...) Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it). People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.
- javajosh 5y ago
  The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game. I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of funding pure mathematics.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      Another reason is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
- rjbwork 5y ago
  If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it, honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount of money.
    - quacked 5y ago
      But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them. How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"? And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
        quacked 5y ago
        Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs. My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy. If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be. I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
- quacked 5y ago
  I don't think I agree with this assessment. I myself am "brainy", but working for actually useful endeavors is easy to balance with a rich, involved life. I can happily dig rocks out of the ground in the morning and write plays in the evening. The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily for myself and my family, rather than for shareholders. Would "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if they were doing road-building work on their own street? I certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the reward was significant time off that I could spend with my family and friends. I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people have been trained to believe in the necessary division of labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you won't ever consider a vision of society where you help produce textiles. If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be building everything that we use in our society for ourselves, not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate processes for white collar companies providing services that we don't actually need.
  - nobodyandproud 5y ago
    I really dig the comment about serfs. We’ve done a great job of hiding-away slavery in the name of consumerism and “uplifting” third world economies. Instead, I would love to see a world where repair and reuse is the norm. And chasing after the largest/outrageous/most-expensive/trendiest is nothing short of embarrassing.
    - NoOneNew 5y ago
      I watched a thing on youtube regarding luxury goods manufacturers as the ultimate slave makers. Not because of the obvious sweat shops, but because they can convince smart/rich people that they're still inadequate and need to work even more so they can buy whatever the hell is being pushed. I thought it was an interesting concept, not 100% onboard, but interesting.
s_dev 5y ago
That sounds like Japan. You could have lads that would have been destined to be astrophysicists or computer architects performing 'working class jobs' like making chefs knives or growing bonzai trees. Skills that are far more modest than their potential. They don't seem any worse off because of it.
- quacked 5y ago
  I have noticed the same thing. I just don't see any reason why, across a span of a 60 year career, you can't do both at the same time- part time astrophysicist, part-time knife maker. I'd repair potholes or monitor an industrial loom for 2 days per week if I could take the rest of the time off.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  how many japanese do you think are in the business of making chef knives and bonzai trees
  - s_dev 5y ago
    Theres probably more Japanese making knives and growing bonzai trees than there are Japanese astrophysicists or computer architects.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Also I think the parent post is ignoring generally accepted realities of the Japanese higher education system. The hardest part of the top tier universities is getting in. Being an actual university student is the time in life when most Japanese slack off, get part time jobs and devote lots of attention to their hobbies. Skipping class is normal in most departments and largely what you get your degree in is meaningless. Japanese university grads merely have to graduate and based on the school they went to will determine which prestigious companies they can successfully apply to. New grads apply to the company, not a specific position and companies allocate their new hires based on what positions they need filled.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > Skills that are far more modest than their potential Ever tried making a decent knife? Or keeping a bonsai tree alive? For 100 years?
jimbokun 5y ago
I don't think the issue is brainy people doing those jobs per se, it's brainy people spending years and a small fortune for a degree, and then end up performing that kind of work anyways. I would guess working class white people in the 1950s US were overall more content than today, even though many fewer of them had college degrees. They were happy performing "sustenance work", because they were able to start those jobs out of high school, support a family, buy a house, etc. (Massive caveat for the people who were excluded from this system back then.)
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
That's basically a society without mass immigration - manual labour becomes more expensive, so educated people spend their time automating tasks and inventing and operating robots.
- quacked 5y ago
  That is one of the many reasons I oppose mass immigration; a constant influx of new people makes it far, far more difficult for a single locality to figure out how best to reduce its own demand and come to a reasonably stable local identity, with an attached reasonable level of demand for goods and services.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children? At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration"?
    - quacked 5y ago
      > Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children? Yeah, if you want to keep the aggregate demand of your society consistent, it makes sense to have fewer than 2 children. (I don't necessarily support government prevention people having more than two children, but a really self-aware group of humans wouldn't spawn uncontrollably.) > At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration" The fact that you're asking me that question implies that my definition is drastically different than your definition. So- I think we can agree that if the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska (475,000) moved over the span of one month to Tahiti (280,000), that could be called "mass immigration", with disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc. So, if you'd call that "mass immigration", which I think you'd be foolish not to, what about that makes it "mass immigration"? Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        > Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine. It's not very helpful for you to say you oppose something if you are using a different definition of that thing than everyone else. Of course I agree with you that doubling the population density of a complex society in a month would lead to negative effects, and you can use that as the threshold for classifying a situation as "mass immigration" if you want, but there's still a tautology there, as you're effectively saying you're against "too much immigration", which is true of just about everyone's position on immigration. (I suppose some people might think that "too much immigration" cannot occur in practice, because any country that is desirable to immigrate to would have the resources to adapt quickly enough to people arriving at the rates that current transportation systems make possible). To give a tighter upper bound, though, rather than considering the population of Omaha, let's look at the population of the whole of the US. In 2019 (so before the pandemic) the population growth rate was 0.60% per year, whereas in the past 70 years, the highest rate was 1.76% (in 1956).[0] So empirically I think we can say that the population growth rate could be almost triple what it is today without that growth rate itself being the cause of "disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc.". However, it is still possible that all of those aspects are negatively affected by the current population density, and that the "ideal" growth rate is negative. What all that means for immigration policy is a further step removed from the data available, but I hope that the above is helpful for thinking about these questions. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...
bjourne 5y ago
Sure, but what you are listing are a far cry from what actually menial jobs are. Fruit picking, burger flipping, telemarketing.. Those jobs are menial on a whole other level than, say, construction work.

I wonder if the economists have ever considered a society where brainy people are happy and proud to perform basic sustenance work- construction, manufacture of textiles, farming, driving, etc.

zelos 5y ago

"I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure." (Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons)

oh-4-fucks-sake 5y ago

[I think psychologists have](https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magical-chart/ https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magic...) Basically, those that are more "brainy" need a higher level of mental stimulation in order to not be bored. Being given too much mental stimulation relative to your intelligence/skills results in anxiety. The sweet spot is somewhere in between and we seek this sweet spot (or at least stumble upon it and remain sticky to it). People then sort themselves over time into these buckets s/t (generally), the brainy people end up doing brainy things, and the not-so-brainy people do less-brainy things. Reversing of roles would be mutually detrimental to both parties.

javajosh 5y ago
The real truth is that brainy people need a way to blow off that brainy steam, and it kinda doesn't matter if it's designing a novel WMD or playing a board-game. I'd argue on that basis that stimulating board-games can save the world.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  I occasionally ponder whether this is the purpose of funding pure mathematics.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    Another reason is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
rjbwork 5y ago
If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it, honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount of money.
  - quacked 5y ago
    But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them. How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"? And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
      - quacked 5y ago
        Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs. My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy. If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be. I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
quacked 5y ago
I don't think I agree with this assessment. I myself am "brainy", but working for actually useful endeavors is easy to balance with a rich, involved life. I can happily dig rocks out of the ground in the morning and write plays in the evening. The difference is that the rock-digging is primarily for myself and my family, rather than for shareholders. Would "brainy" people need a higher level of mental stimulation if they were doing road-building work on their own street? I certainly wouldn't be happy as a truck driver, but I could easily work as a truck driver for a month straight if the reward was significant time off that I could spend with my family and friends. I'm not doing a great job at explaining this- a lot of people have been trained to believe in the necessary division of labor, but their belief that they could never do manual labor allows the overlords of society to keep everyone in the rat race. If you think you could never work in a textile factory because you need more mental stimulation than that, then you won't ever consider a vision of society where you help produce textiles. If people really want a ten-hour work week, we need to be building everything that we use in our society for ourselves, not relying on serfs in foreign countries to do the grunt work while we do "stimulating work", i.e. building elaborate processes for white collar companies providing services that we don't actually need.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  I really dig the comment about serfs. We’ve done a great job of hiding-away slavery in the name of consumerism and “uplifting” third world economies. Instead, I would love to see a world where repair and reuse is the norm. And chasing after the largest/outrageous/most-expensive/trendiest is nothing short of embarrassing.
  - NoOneNew 5y ago
    I watched a thing on youtube regarding luxury goods manufacturers as the ultimate slave makers. Not because of the obvious sweat shops, but because they can convince smart/rich people that they're still inadequate and need to work even more so they can buy whatever the hell is being pushed. I thought it was an interesting concept, not 100% onboard, but interesting.

s_dev 5y ago

That sounds like Japan. You could have lads that would have been destined to be astrophysicists or computer architects performing 'working class jobs' like making chefs knives or growing bonzai trees. Skills that are far more modest than their potential. They don't seem any worse off because of it.

quacked 5y ago
I have noticed the same thing. I just don't see any reason why, across a span of a 60 year career, you can't do both at the same time- part time astrophysicist, part-time knife maker. I'd repair potholes or monitor an industrial loom for 2 days per week if I could take the rest of the time off.
missedthecue 5y ago
how many japanese do you think are in the business of making chef knives and bonzai trees
- s_dev 5y ago
  Theres probably more Japanese making knives and growing bonzai trees than there are Japanese astrophysicists or computer architects.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Also I think the parent post is ignoring generally accepted realities of the Japanese higher education system. The hardest part of the top tier universities is getting in. Being an actual university student is the time in life when most Japanese slack off, get part time jobs and devote lots of attention to their hobbies. Skipping class is normal in most departments and largely what you get your degree in is meaningless. Japanese university grads merely have to graduate and based on the school they went to will determine which prestigious companies they can successfully apply to. New grads apply to the company, not a specific position and companies allocate their new hires based on what positions they need filled.
cratermoon 5y ago
> Skills that are far more modest than their potential Ever tried making a decent knife? Or keeping a bonsai tree alive? For 100 years?

jimbokun 5y ago

I don't think the issue is brainy people doing those jobs per se, it's brainy people spending years and a small fortune for a degree, and then end up performing that kind of work anyways. I would guess working class white people in the 1950s US were overall more content than today, even though many fewer of them had college degrees. They were happy performing "sustenance work", because they were able to start those jobs out of high school, support a family, buy a house, etc. (Massive caveat for the people who were excluded from this system back then.)

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

That's basically a society without mass immigration - manual labour becomes more expensive, so educated people spend their time automating tasks and inventing and operating robots.

quacked 5y ago
That is one of the many reasons I oppose mass immigration; a constant influx of new people makes it far, far more difficult for a single locality to figure out how best to reduce its own demand and come to a reasonably stable local identity, with an attached reasonable level of demand for goods and services.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children? At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration"?
  - quacked 5y ago
    > Do you also oppose people having more than 2 children? Yeah, if you want to keep the aggregate demand of your society consistent, it makes sense to have fewer than 2 children. (I don't necessarily support government prevention people having more than two children, but a really self-aware group of humans wouldn't spawn uncontrollably.) > At what point does "immigration" become "mass immigration" The fact that you're asking me that question implies that my definition is drastically different than your definition. So- I think we can agree that if the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska (475,000) moved over the span of one month to Tahiti (280,000), that could be called "mass immigration", with disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc. So, if you'd call that "mass immigration", which I think you'd be foolish not to, what about that makes it "mass immigration"? Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > Whatever your definition is, it'll be different from mine. It's not very helpful for you to say you oppose something if you are using a different definition of that thing than everyone else. Of course I agree with you that doubling the population density of a complex society in a month would lead to negative effects, and you can use that as the threshold for classifying a situation as "mass immigration" if you want, but there's still a tautology there, as you're effectively saying you're against "too much immigration", which is true of just about everyone's position on immigration. (I suppose some people might think that "too much immigration" cannot occur in practice, because any country that is desirable to immigrate to would have the resources to adapt quickly enough to people arriving at the rates that current transportation systems make possible). To give a tighter upper bound, though, rather than considering the population of Omaha, let's look at the population of the whole of the US. In 2019 (so before the pandemic) the population growth rate was 0.60% per year, whereas in the past 70 years, the highest rate was 1.76% (in 1956).[0] So empirically I think we can say that the population growth rate could be almost triple what it is today without that growth rate itself being the cause of "disastrous consequences for the local culture, politics, ecosystem, etc.". However, it is still possible that all of those aspects are negatively affected by the current population density, and that the "ideal" growth rate is negative. What all that means for immigration policy is a further step removed from the data available, but I hope that the above is helpful for thinking about these questions. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

bjourne 5y ago

Sure, but what you are listing are a far cry from what actually menial jobs are. Fruit picking, burger flipping, telemarketing.. Those jobs are menial on a whole other level than, say, construction work.