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>some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's n
by Frost1x 5y ago
>some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive.
The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life.
People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.
- clairity 5y agoyah, that's why ultimately the better focus is on a more equitable (but not equal) distribution of pay and wealth. worrying about the number of hours in a work week (or even minimum wage, in the long run) is a distraction in this regard (popular distractions on hn and elsewhere, by how well received such misguided ideas seem to be). we should be making labor markets radically transparent for workers, and legislatively shifting power to humans over amoral corporate entities. companies should be working for the people at large, not the other way around. once you accumulate about $2-10MM in assets, you've won the economy and we should make it steeply, progressively harder (but not impossible) to accumulate more. this also has the nice side effect of making the economy more dynamic and resilient, while also fostering more innovation all around.