8 ms·

I always wonder what is the point of progress if we can't use it to solve basic problems like people not having food, shelter or access to basic medical help.

hereforphone 5y ago
It's almost like the problem's harder than it seems at first glance or something
- jeffrallen 5y ago
  The first job is buy-in. When a society collectively chooses to solve some difficult problem, it gets solved, no matter how hard it is. Apollo program or homelessness.
  - orzig 5y ago
    Or cancer! Oh oops
    - jeffrallen 5y ago
      5-year survival rates have improved — for some cancers — in adolescents and young adults https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/5-year-survival-rates-have-improved-for-some-cancers-in-adolescents-and-young-adults/ https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/5-year-survival-rates-have-impr...
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Cancer is many things rather than one, and some of those things have been solved.
      - FeepingCreature 5y ago
        So's homelessness.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      Cancer is a hugely complex problem. It is not a single attack vector like a virus. But we are still making great progress on it, just think that the best vaccines for Covid came as fruit of cancer research.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    It depends on the kind of problem. An engineering challenge, even a really difficult one, is something that can be attacked with effort. Changing human beings is far far more difficult. Perhaps impossible on timescales less than generations. We’ve had societies that really wanted to stop people from using mind altering substances, agree with that goal or not it was something that multiple societies choose to try to solve and mostly they failed. The ones that partly succeeded were the ones that used heinously brutal methods.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    When was the last time somebody stepped on the moon? If that's success criteria, we just need to stick all the homeless in a hotel for a night, declare the problem solved, then kick them out in the morning.
  - patrec 5y ago
    Back in reality, the majority of society was opposed to the Apollo program (even after the successful landing support was only lukewarm) and I have no difficulty thinking of difficult problems with enormous societal buy-in and vast funding that proved intractable. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
  - umvi 5y ago
    I don't buy it. Apollo almost failed many times by administrative churn and lack of public support. Apollo was successful because of passionate engineers working on the problem not by public support
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      The engineers did not pay for the project or their salaries. And certainly they weren't working for free or even under market rate.
      - umvi 5y ago
        The salaried engineers worked way more hours than a 9-5 and were not paid overtime AFAIK
        lmilcin 5y ago
        Which is almost every company I have worked for for the past 20 years. Listen, these guys were very good, dedicated engineers. But to say they did this without public support is stupid, because they were paid for from public money in the first place. The public support comes in many ways. Just because some people didn't like the idea doesn't mean there was no public support. The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC.
        umvi 5y ago
        > The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC. Well if that's your definition of "public support", Apollo just barely had enough to succeed. The Lyndon B. Johnson Administration that came after JFK was actively defunding Apollo and trying to dismantle the space program. Back to my original point, society didn't "collectively decide" to make moon landings happen. JFK made a few bold claims to boost his public image against Russia and his successors tried to dismantle said space program. If it weren't for the tenacious engineers and leaders at NASA, moon landings would not have happened. In other words, if the engineers/leaders at NASA were not passionate enough, LBJ would have succeeded at dismantling Apollo.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  Certainly half of it is. Unfortunately, it's not the half of the problem that progress is helping with since we're not for a lack of productive output or a dearth of needless waste.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc. Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling to fund infrastructure and projects to put this technology in use. Think of it like a software team that has excellent developers but terrible devops. The developers have long long since fixed many of the bugs and implemented most of the features, but the devops is slow, corrupt, and incompetent so very few of the features actually make it to production.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc. There is no technological problem. We are already wasting more food that would be necessary to feed people who are starving. Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job. And when we need we can somehow find a way to crank out vaccine to vaccinate entire countries. And these are given out for free (of course, we pay for them in taxes, but still it can be done...) > Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling I think you meant "willing". Here, this is the problem. When you say it is "political class", what you really say it is not your problem. And this is the cause of why this is not getting solved. Because the problem is really you and other people like you who think it is not their problem. If the people decided it is a problem worth solving and supported it with their votes, the "political class" would follow and solve the problem. The "political class" responds to what is on peoples minds and to what people want. If people decide to spend their focus quabbling over building big walls or election results or vaccine efficacy, guess what is not getting solved? Anything else isn't getting solved.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      Being an immigrant and not allowed to vote, it is not fair to claim I’m responsible for the political class. Also public opinion rarely results in policy. Most Americans for example favor spending on green infrastructure to tackle the climate crisis, most Americans favor a more universal health care system, etc. yet the political class is hesitant.
- kiba 5y ago
  The most difficult problems in life are sometime political, not physics or technical challenges.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted, obviously you are right. Now, the political problem reflects us as people. If people wanted the problem solved, politicians would find a way to solve it for the sake of their own interest. The way I understand it is that most people are really selfish in that they only care about themselves and maybe family and friends. And it doesn't get any better because people are more and more focusing on themselves and getting cut off from community.
yarky 5y ago
I'd guess it's all about individual vs collective progress. I've realized that places with homogeneous demographics (e.g. nordics) are usually those interested in solving what you call basic problems while the focus tends towards individual progress wherever people look less alike. I guess there must be well understood tribe/ethnic reasons to explain that.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Nordic countries are kinda special in this regard. Historically, you were very unlikely to survive in northern climate on your own. Being part of community was necessary prerequisite for survival. I have been on couple trips to northern Norway/Sweden. People there did not even have locks in their houses, it wasn't even necessary. I wonder if it changed now with advent of migrations from eastern Europe and Middle East.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Same in Northern Canada. When buying a house there usually at the end of the financial part of the transfer of a house you get the keys. The previous owners rather sheepishly admitted they didn't have them. Lawyer pipes up 'then we'll have to change the locks'. Owners say that's going to be a lot of work because the doors never had any locks in the first place. We kept it like that.
    - wccrawford 5y ago
      I can't even imagine not changes the locks on a house you just bought. (Unless, as in your case, locks aren't even desired.) Even if the previous owner had no malicious intent, they might have accidentally kept a key that someone else could get ahold of... Or they might have given out a key, etc. There's no good reason to avoid it, IMO.
      - bittercynic 5y ago
        It's also a fun thing to do. The re-key kit is only a few bucks, and it's a pretty simple process, and you get to enjoy the ingenuity contained in the lock while you work on it.
jokoon 5y ago
Well, technological progress doesn't necessarily cause social progress, but it might allow it though. It's a problem of values. Despite abundance, people still believe that people who don't work a 9to5 job are not worthy or good treatment. Most people still believe in a hierarchy of people and values, and that "there is no free meal", except yes, there is: most food is subsidized and cheap. Like it or not, "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") was displayed at the entrance of concentration camps, and I really think that if you ask people around, they would still hold the same opinion that 100% of people should work and that nobody should escape that. Now, work is divided between "noble" work, which is essentially office work, and "essential" jobs, which are necessary. Like in the middle ages, nobility is better valued because they're privileged. Society is really upside down, and despite the years of communism and socialism, which are mostly dead now, it seems we haven't really evolved.
- imtringued 5y ago
  The contradiction lies in the fact that people work so they can work less and once there are people that do not have to work then how do they get access to that abundance? Through their own work? That would defeat the point. Through the work of others? The working people will get angry because they want to work and for the sake of fairness, they demand others to work just as hard even if there is no work for them to be done. Yes you can create more work so that everyone has work but what people forget is that you have to create those jobs in the first place. The reason why politicians should strive for full employment is that abundance of labor leads to desperation, which leads to a worse treatment of workers and thus employers are more willing to waste their time. When there is full employment then labor is scarce and precious, meaning the time of the workers is scarce and precious which means employers will either make sure that the workers are treated well and enjoy their time or at least let their time be used for more "productive" endeavors. >Society is really upside down, and despite the years of communism and socialism, which are mostly dead now, it seems we haven't really evolved. They are solving the wrong problem. Really, just make sure basic macroeconomic accounting rules work and everything will be fine. For example: Everything produced must be consumed. When you apply this principle on labor, full employment becomes inevitable. How does our economic system violate that rule? It is possible to earn more than you spend, meaning you produce more than you consume. The excess is the deposit in your bank account. If you don't consume labor through work then it will be consumed by being idle. Thus the real value of your savings is eroding day by day until one day your savings have no value because all the freed time was spent idle. Thus the logical conclusion is that there must be a deadline for your savings. At some point you must spend them before they lost all their value, not because there is an evil government stealing your money or whatever, because nature is eroding the real value of your money. Labor is spoiling the same way fruit spoil. If you want to save then you should save in real terms. i.e. you use your money to buy goods that last longer than labor (a house or industrial machinery) or a promise of a future payment (bonds or stocks). Saving in real terms leads to the employment of other people rather than their unemployment because it still counts as spending for accounting purposes. The reason why a gold standard is a stupid idea is that linking money to something like gold will make people hold onto the currency because of the exposure of gold. When gold goes up in value people will stop spending because their nominal wealth is going up even though their real wealth isn't going up. In fact, by not spending your money there will be people that didn't work and your real wealth is actually going down. There is another reason why spending should be forced or encouraged: Debts create money and repaying them destroys money. Holding onto money prevents debts from being repaid or in other words: The debt will exist as long as the deposit exists. There are obvious implications: Government debt can never go down because deposits never go down because people are not forced to spend them.
throwaway-x123 5y ago
Lets consider more common case with working poor. At the same time we see high income inequality. We see unemployment. We see that productivity is a few times higher than it was in 1930. What is the solution? I think you know it, it was done once, 100 years ago. The work day was reduced to 8 hours/day. It could be reduced now to say 4 hours/day. No wage cut. In the past, who reduced the work day? The workers organized and reduced the work day. Why they do not do that? I think they do not know that they can work less. They still think they need to work more to produce all the food, more houses, etc. While in reality they produce income inequality, lots of bullshit jobs and unemployment. You can help, agitate, organize, join union for shorter workday same wage.
- vidarh 5y ago
  A point on the 8 hour work day, because a lot of people will instantly think "Ford", is that it took decades of union campaigning, and quite a few dead and injured in clashes with police and Pinkerton agents, to start getting traction. By the time Ford shortened his working hours, the unions had already gotten hours cut a lot and put in a huge amount of effort changing the narrative on working hours. Most people are also unaware that May 1st as the international day for labour demonstrations is in part in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, and as the starting point for a renewed fight for the 8-hour working day in its aftermath, on the request of the AFL president at the time.
- ericd 5y ago
  There are also far fewer barriers to working with people around the world who don't demand nearly so much as you are, than there were in 1930. We could put some up, but it's not as just simple as saying "we want twice the hourly wage and half the workday". Cheap international flights, instant high fidelity telecommunication, standardized container shipping, and streamlined trade with low trade barriers are just a few of the things that have made it less necessary to find workers locally.
endisneigh 5y ago
you could make a strong argument that humanity has barely progressed socially in spite of vast technological development
gmadsen 5y ago
because those problems involve messy parts of the human experience. math/physics, basic science can be pretty divorced from human sociology/psychology/etc. you don't need to think of the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects on society if you prove some theorem in number theory.
EGreg 5y ago
This is not a new question. In fact, over 100 years ago, a person got really famous writing a book called Progress and Poverty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty His name was Henry George, and he famously recommended reducing all taxes to one: the land tax. His book was hailed by everyone from Milton Friedman to Leo Tolstoy and US Presidents wrote glowing reviews. And somehow, it is all forgotten today, except among trained economists who had to maybe read it in college. Most libertarians in the US today are capitalist, and have no concept of Georgism or left-libertarianism.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  The trouble is that the times of land meaning anything are over. In today's world of intangible goods you can produce without owning any land. Why would multi-billion pharma company pay less taxes than a local farmer, because the land needed for offices to run bio-research is less than a small field to grow crops for couple families?
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Looking at real estate prices, land is far from worthless.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      I am not saying land is worthless. I am saying that owning land is no longer prerequisite for producing a lot. Two hundred years ago you had to own land to be "big", because most ways to produce anything required land to grow crops or land to extract natural resources or services with connection with those two types of activity. If you look at top 10 largest companies in the world, only one is tied to a lot of land or services for other companies with lots of land (Saudi Aramco). Before one hundred years ago the largest companies or wealth creators would inevitably be largest land owners or ones that provide services for largest land owners.
- at_compile_time 5y ago
  Link to the audiobook for anyone else interested: https://librivox.org/progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/ https://librivox.org/progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/
panic 5y ago
What we think of as 'progress' depends on a lot of dangerous and unpleasant labor. It would be difficult to get people to do this labor without the the threat of homelessness and starvation.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Perhaps viewed differently: providing everyone with food, water, power, housing, and medical care takes a lot of unpleasant and coordinated effort and that needs to be paid for somehow.
- bsanr2 5y ago
  There are many historical examples of people participating in less-than-ideal labor situations because they were well-compensated and saw that their work would lead to greater prosperity for their community and country. The carrot was enough and the stick superfluous. Capitalists often fall prey to the notion that hard and productive work isn't being performed unless someone is sacrificing their health or safety or happiness; that's wrong. We can do these things and provide a good life for the people doing them, too. In some cases this will mean that the doing will be its value itself, or even a loss leader for other efforts. That's fine; not everything needs to be profitable to be valuable.
ashtonkem 5y ago
I’d argue that progress and “people not having food, shelter, or access to basic medical help” are definitionally incompatible.
agumonkey 5y ago
world is complex, i'm not excusing but i've seen enough absurdity like these to start to know that, at large scales, simple becomes problematic. money flows where big pockets and trends go, unless it's a country which values a solid higher ground for all, you'll be left out
rayiner 5y ago
We do all of those things! Medicaid, Section 8, SNAP, SSDI, etc.
crisdux 5y ago
We have solved those issues for the vast majority of the country! Heck we provide all of that and more. Now we are even giving welfare payments to middle and upper middle income families(in the form of an enhanced child tax credit).
ithinkso 5y ago
I think it comes down to 'I work to have what I have, why others should have things for free'. Even though the things you get for working are good and you have a great life, and the free things are shit but let you at least survive just barely, it's still too much. 'If I work to have a great life, those that don't are not eligible for anything, not even the smallest things' and then you can complain about homelessness in your area because it's more important to be able to complain than to solve the issue and get rid of the issue to complain about

hereforphone 5y ago

It's almost like the problem's harder than it seems at first glance or something

jeffrallen 5y ago
The first job is buy-in. When a society collectively chooses to solve some difficult problem, it gets solved, no matter how hard it is. Apollo program or homelessness.
- orzig 5y ago
  Or cancer! Oh oops
  - jeffrallen 5y ago
    5-year survival rates have improved — for some cancers — in adolescents and young adults https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/5-year-survival-rates-have-improved-for-some-cancers-in-adolescents-and-young-adults/ https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/5-year-survival-rates-have-impr...
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Cancer is many things rather than one, and some of those things have been solved.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      So's homelessness.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    Cancer is a hugely complex problem. It is not a single attack vector like a virus. But we are still making great progress on it, just think that the best vaccines for Covid came as fruit of cancer research.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  It depends on the kind of problem. An engineering challenge, even a really difficult one, is something that can be attacked with effort. Changing human beings is far far more difficult. Perhaps impossible on timescales less than generations. We’ve had societies that really wanted to stop people from using mind altering substances, agree with that goal or not it was something that multiple societies choose to try to solve and mostly they failed. The ones that partly succeeded were the ones that used heinously brutal methods.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  When was the last time somebody stepped on the moon? If that's success criteria, we just need to stick all the homeless in a hotel for a night, declare the problem solved, then kick them out in the morning.
- patrec 5y ago
  Back in reality, the majority of society was opposed to the Apollo program (even after the successful landing support was only lukewarm) and I have no difficulty thinking of difficult problems with enormous societal buy-in and vast funding that proved intractable. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
- umvi 5y ago
  I don't buy it. Apollo almost failed many times by administrative churn and lack of public support. Apollo was successful because of passionate engineers working on the problem not by public support
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    The engineers did not pay for the project or their salaries. And certainly they weren't working for free or even under market rate.
    - umvi 5y ago
      The salaried engineers worked way more hours than a 9-5 and were not paid overtime AFAIK
      - lmilcin 5y ago
        Which is almost every company I have worked for for the past 20 years. Listen, these guys were very good, dedicated engineers. But to say they did this without public support is stupid, because they were paid for from public money in the first place. The public support comes in many ways. Just because some people didn't like the idea doesn't mean there was no public support. The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC.
        umvi 5y ago
        > The ultimate public support is the government, which is officials elected by... wait for it... THE PUBLIC. Well if that's your definition of "public support", Apollo just barely had enough to succeed. The Lyndon B. Johnson Administration that came after JFK was actively defunding Apollo and trying to dismantle the space program. Back to my original point, society didn't "collectively decide" to make moon landings happen. JFK made a few bold claims to boost his public image against Russia and his successors tried to dismantle said space program. If it weren't for the tenacious engineers and leaders at NASA, moon landings would not have happened. In other words, if the engineers/leaders at NASA were not passionate enough, LBJ would have succeeded at dismantling Apollo.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
Certainly half of it is. Unfortunately, it's not the half of the problem that progress is helping with since we're not for a lack of productive output or a dearth of needless waste.
runarberg 5y ago
Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc. Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling to fund infrastructure and projects to put this technology in use. Think of it like a software team that has excellent developers but terrible devops. The developers have long long since fixed many of the bugs and implemented most of the features, but the devops is slow, corrupt, and incompetent so very few of the features actually make it to production.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc. There is no technological problem. We are already wasting more food that would be necessary to feed people who are starving. Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job. And when we need we can somehow find a way to crank out vaccine to vaccinate entire countries. And these are given out for free (of course, we pay for them in taxes, but still it can be done...) > Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling I think you meant "willing". Here, this is the problem. When you say it is "political class", what you really say it is not your problem. And this is the cause of why this is not getting solved. Because the problem is really you and other people like you who think it is not their problem. If the people decided it is a problem worth solving and supported it with their votes, the "political class" would follow and solve the problem. The "political class" responds to what is on peoples minds and to what people want. If people decide to spend their focus quabbling over building big walls or election results or vaccine efficacy, guess what is not getting solved? Anything else isn't getting solved.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Being an immigrant and not allowed to vote, it is not fair to claim I’m responsible for the political class. Also public opinion rarely results in policy. Most Americans for example favor spending on green infrastructure to tackle the climate crisis, most Americans favor a more universal health care system, etc. yet the political class is hesitant.
kiba 5y ago
The most difficult problems in life are sometime political, not physics or technical challenges.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted, obviously you are right. Now, the political problem reflects us as people. If people wanted the problem solved, politicians would find a way to solve it for the sake of their own interest. The way I understand it is that most people are really selfish in that they only care about themselves and maybe family and friends. And it doesn't get any better because people are more and more focusing on themselves and getting cut off from community.

yarky 5y ago

I'd guess it's all about individual vs collective progress. I've realized that places with homogeneous demographics (e.g. nordics) are usually those interested in solving what you call basic problems while the focus tends towards individual progress wherever people look less alike. I guess there must be well understood tribe/ethnic reasons to explain that.

lmilcin 5y ago
Nordic countries are kinda special in this regard. Historically, you were very unlikely to survive in northern climate on your own. Being part of community was necessary prerequisite for survival. I have been on couple trips to northern Norway/Sweden. People there did not even have locks in their houses, it wasn't even necessary. I wonder if it changed now with advent of migrations from eastern Europe and Middle East.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Same in Northern Canada. When buying a house there usually at the end of the financial part of the transfer of a house you get the keys. The previous owners rather sheepishly admitted they didn't have them. Lawyer pipes up 'then we'll have to change the locks'. Owners say that's going to be a lot of work because the doors never had any locks in the first place. We kept it like that.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    I can't even imagine not changes the locks on a house you just bought. (Unless, as in your case, locks aren't even desired.) Even if the previous owner had no malicious intent, they might have accidentally kept a key that someone else could get ahold of... Or they might have given out a key, etc. There's no good reason to avoid it, IMO.
    - bittercynic 5y ago
      It's also a fun thing to do. The re-key kit is only a few bucks, and it's a pretty simple process, and you get to enjoy the ingenuity contained in the lock while you work on it.

jokoon 5y ago

Well, technological progress doesn't necessarily cause social progress, but it might allow it though. It's a problem of values. Despite abundance, people still believe that people who don't work a 9to5 job are not worthy or good treatment. Most people still believe in a hierarchy of people and values, and that "there is no free meal", except yes, there is: most food is subsidized and cheap. Like it or not, "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") was displayed at the entrance of concentration camps, and I really think that if you ask people around, they would still hold the same opinion that 100% of people should work and that nobody should escape that. Now, work is divided between "noble" work, which is essentially office work, and "essential" jobs, which are necessary. Like in the middle ages, nobility is better valued because they're privileged. Society is really upside down, and despite the years of communism and socialism, which are mostly dead now, it seems we haven't really evolved.

imtringued 5y ago
The contradiction lies in the fact that people work so they can work less and once there are people that do not have to work then how do they get access to that abundance? Through their own work? That would defeat the point. Through the work of others? The working people will get angry because they want to work and for the sake of fairness, they demand others to work just as hard even if there is no work for them to be done. Yes you can create more work so that everyone has work but what people forget is that you have to create those jobs in the first place. The reason why politicians should strive for full employment is that abundance of labor leads to desperation, which leads to a worse treatment of workers and thus employers are more willing to waste their time. When there is full employment then labor is scarce and precious, meaning the time of the workers is scarce and precious which means employers will either make sure that the workers are treated well and enjoy their time or at least let their time be used for more "productive" endeavors. >Society is really upside down, and despite the years of communism and socialism, which are mostly dead now, it seems we haven't really evolved. They are solving the wrong problem. Really, just make sure basic macroeconomic accounting rules work and everything will be fine. For example: Everything produced must be consumed. When you apply this principle on labor, full employment becomes inevitable. How does our economic system violate that rule? It is possible to earn more than you spend, meaning you produce more than you consume. The excess is the deposit in your bank account. If you don't consume labor through work then it will be consumed by being idle. Thus the real value of your savings is eroding day by day until one day your savings have no value because all the freed time was spent idle. Thus the logical conclusion is that there must be a deadline for your savings. At some point you must spend them before they lost all their value, not because there is an evil government stealing your money or whatever, because nature is eroding the real value of your money. Labor is spoiling the same way fruit spoil. If you want to save then you should save in real terms. i.e. you use your money to buy goods that last longer than labor (a house or industrial machinery) or a promise of a future payment (bonds or stocks). Saving in real terms leads to the employment of other people rather than their unemployment because it still counts as spending for accounting purposes. The reason why a gold standard is a stupid idea is that linking money to something like gold will make people hold onto the currency because of the exposure of gold. When gold goes up in value people will stop spending because their nominal wealth is going up even though their real wealth isn't going up. In fact, by not spending your money there will be people that didn't work and your real wealth is actually going down. There is another reason why spending should be forced or encouraged: Debts create money and repaying them destroys money. Holding onto money prevents debts from being repaid or in other words: The debt will exist as long as the deposit exists. There are obvious implications: Government debt can never go down because deposits never go down because people are not forced to spend them.

throwaway-x123 5y ago

Lets consider more common case with working poor. At the same time we see high income inequality. We see unemployment. We see that productivity is a few times higher than it was in 1930. What is the solution? I think you know it, it was done once, 100 years ago. The work day was reduced to 8 hours/day. It could be reduced now to say 4 hours/day. No wage cut. In the past, who reduced the work day? The workers organized and reduced the work day. Why they do not do that? I think they do not know that they can work less. They still think they need to work more to produce all the food, more houses, etc. While in reality they produce income inequality, lots of bullshit jobs and unemployment. You can help, agitate, organize, join union for shorter workday same wage.

vidarh 5y ago
A point on the 8 hour work day, because a lot of people will instantly think "Ford", is that it took decades of union campaigning, and quite a few dead and injured in clashes with police and Pinkerton agents, to start getting traction. By the time Ford shortened his working hours, the unions had already gotten hours cut a lot and put in a huge amount of effort changing the narrative on working hours. Most people are also unaware that May 1st as the international day for labour demonstrations is in part in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, and as the starting point for a renewed fight for the 8-hour working day in its aftermath, on the request of the AFL president at the time.
ericd 5y ago
There are also far fewer barriers to working with people around the world who don't demand nearly so much as you are, than there were in 1930. We could put some up, but it's not as just simple as saying "we want twice the hourly wage and half the workday". Cheap international flights, instant high fidelity telecommunication, standardized container shipping, and streamlined trade with low trade barriers are just a few of the things that have made it less necessary to find workers locally.

endisneigh 5y ago

you could make a strong argument that humanity has barely progressed socially in spite of vast technological development

gmadsen 5y ago

because those problems involve messy parts of the human experience. math/physics, basic science can be pretty divorced from human sociology/psychology/etc. you don't need to think of the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects on society if you prove some theorem in number theory.

EGreg 5y ago

This is not a new question. In fact, over 100 years ago, a person got really famous writing a book called Progress and Poverty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty His name was Henry George, and he famously recommended reducing all taxes to one: the land tax. His book was hailed by everyone from Milton Friedman to Leo Tolstoy and US Presidents wrote glowing reviews. And somehow, it is all forgotten today, except among trained economists who had to maybe read it in college. Most libertarians in the US today are capitalist, and have no concept of Georgism or left-libertarianism.

lmilcin 5y ago
The trouble is that the times of land meaning anything are over. In today's world of intangible goods you can produce without owning any land. Why would multi-billion pharma company pay less taxes than a local farmer, because the land needed for offices to run bio-research is less than a small field to grow crops for couple families?
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Looking at real estate prices, land is far from worthless.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    I am not saying land is worthless. I am saying that owning land is no longer prerequisite for producing a lot. Two hundred years ago you had to own land to be "big", because most ways to produce anything required land to grow crops or land to extract natural resources or services with connection with those two types of activity. If you look at top 10 largest companies in the world, only one is tied to a lot of land or services for other companies with lots of land (Saudi Aramco). Before one hundred years ago the largest companies or wealth creators would inevitably be largest land owners or ones that provide services for largest land owners.
at_compile_time 5y ago
Link to the audiobook for anyone else interested: https://librivox.org/progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/ https://librivox.org/progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/

panic 5y ago

What we think of as 'progress' depends on a lot of dangerous and unpleasant labor. It would be difficult to get people to do this labor without the the threat of homelessness and starvation.

sokoloff 5y ago
Perhaps viewed differently: providing everyone with food, water, power, housing, and medical care takes a lot of unpleasant and coordinated effort and that needs to be paid for somehow.
bsanr2 5y ago
There are many historical examples of people participating in less-than-ideal labor situations because they were well-compensated and saw that their work would lead to greater prosperity for their community and country. The carrot was enough and the stick superfluous. Capitalists often fall prey to the notion that hard and productive work isn't being performed unless someone is sacrificing their health or safety or happiness; that's wrong. We can do these things and provide a good life for the people doing them, too. In some cases this will mean that the doing will be its value itself, or even a loss leader for other efforts. That's fine; not everything needs to be profitable to be valuable.

ashtonkem 5y ago

I’d argue that progress and “people not having food, shelter, or access to basic medical help” are definitionally incompatible.

agumonkey 5y ago

world is complex, i'm not excusing but i've seen enough absurdity like these to start to know that, at large scales, simple becomes problematic. money flows where big pockets and trends go, unless it's a country which values a solid higher ground for all, you'll be left out

rayiner 5y ago

We do all of those things! Medicaid, Section 8, SNAP, SSDI, etc.

crisdux 5y ago

We have solved those issues for the vast majority of the country! Heck we provide all of that and more. Now we are even giving welfare payments to middle and upper middle income families(in the form of an enhanced child tax credit).

ithinkso 5y ago

I think it comes down to 'I work to have what I have, why others should have things for free'. Even though the things you get for working are good and you have a great life, and the free things are shit but let you at least survive just barely, it's still too much. 'If I work to have a great life, those that don't are not eligible for anything, not even the smallest things' and then you can complain about homelessness in your area because it's more important to be able to complain than to solve the issue and get rid of the issue to complain about