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The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. When combined with helping the poor it would encourage parasitism. Para

• agumonkey 5y ago
  I wonder if previous eras (before the massive space taken by economic principles) had a different view on incentives and performance. The current system doesn't reward performance in general, just a few instances here and there, the rest is actually backward (good employees are ignored, sometimes hated, sometimes fired even).
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet. The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix. That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)
  • Jensson 5y ago
    > The current system doesn't reward performance in general The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors. Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.
      • Jensson 5y ago
        You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.
        • agumonkey 5y ago
          I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.
          • Jensson 5y ago
            Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying. "But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!" No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.
            • agumonkey 5y ago
• imtringued 5y ago
  I don't get it. If you cap income then some people stop working and other people start working. There is no need for parasites. The idea of an income cap is wrong because absolute income does not determine willingness to spend. It is unspent money that should be capped via taxes.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    It would be very cool if money would need to be invested in the real sector at the end. we would be sending people to Mars already. Right now they just fuel blowing bubbles.
• marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It he only incentive to do stuff money? Asking because I find myself building a lot of stuff despite not really making money off it.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Are you building hobby things for your entertainment (which I do as well) or building things which make society advance and which others benefit from? It’s the loss of incentives for the latter that concern me.
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Well, both. I'm building and running this: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ Paid the server out of pocket, built the code all by myself. I do take donations that currently just about cover the running costs, but at this surplus it will take me something like 30 years to get back the hardware investment (assuming no hardware fails in the interim and running costs don't increase). Don't take this as complaining, it's just a statement of facts. I'm incredibly grateful that so many people are supporting it.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    building what ? I'm curious
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I've built and operate a search engine.
  • tibbetts 5y ago
    The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.
• baybal2 5y ago
  > Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to. 100% agree, look no further than current communist, and ex-communist countries. Even ones which succesfully "decommunized" still have that ex-party member class which still lives off fraud, and economic crimes 30 years after.
  • bserge 5y ago
    You actually think the political class is not full of thieves anywhere else? It's a career path that attracts this kind of people, like flies to shit.
    • baybal2 5y ago
      I am calling countries in which communists are no longer the political class, but even when turned into a social underlayer class, these fellows, and their offspring, or even their grandchildren cannot vean themselves off economic parasitism, and economic crime. They are becoming a multigenerational class living off economic crime.
      • bserge 5y ago
        Yeah, I often hate doctors myself. Doesn't mean the majority are bad.
      • kelseyfrog 5y ago
        I can't help but laugh because your last line perfectly describes inheritance, a practice whose abolishment was demanded in The Communist Manifesto.
  • shitloadofbooks 5y ago
    I think you're forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) all the great political and economic frauds that have happened in capitalist systems too. I don't think any political/economical/social system can ever be immune to fraud and sociopaths.
• dijit 5y ago
  How does that worldview jive with the notion that I'd do my job even if I wasn't so handsomely paid? There will always be differentiators. I don't work with garbage or have to break my back, this is worth "performing" for.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    This is because you have culture which encourages performance. Once you enable parasitism other cultures also arise, which discourage performance, and the people of those cultures just don't have that notion. They may even look attractive. Think hippies. They surely look better and have greater outlook than wage slaves, housewives or salesmen. And that trend is notoriously hard to reverse. Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.
    • dijit 5y ago
      >Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school. I think you're reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn't completely support here. I live in the EU and I was one of the people who didn't want to attend school, because school is glorified daycare and in impoverished areas it quite literally feels like prison. I don't really know if you're right, my mum and I grew up living on income support and while it was awful I do cherish the fact that I got to spend time with her. She now works for the government, I work in tech, we've both "done more" but the money she earns now isn't the reason for that, it's because: 1) It's BORING to sit on your arse and do nothing 2) People identify with their purpose (hippies identified with anti-war, and even hippies have had productive impacts on society with social movements, music and art) 3) When free to do anything: you do the thing you love This last point means you can't keep treating service workers like shit, which is why it's unpopular.
      • Dazdraperma 5y ago
        > When free to do anything: you do the thing you love The thing is, what you love is not what others need. Do you love tinkering with my sewage system? Clean my house? Wash my toilet?
• headsoup 5y ago
  Define 'perform.'
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    If I am to be working without monetary incentive, as many here suggest, I would still do something. But I will mostly focus on things which amuse me, and not on anything in real demand by society. Even then I will only do the most exciting part while leaving a trail of technical debt. Would you expect anything else? People fixing obscure bugs in legacy products for you instead of reinventing the wheel, poorly?
• bserge 5y ago
  Someone from 1800 or earlier would call us parasites. We work so little and own so much! Time to go back to owning nothing and working all day every day under threat of actual violence and starvation. Now that's performance! (I'm afraid some rich assholes actually believe that today, of course they'd be the leaders of such a society) There's still room for QoL improvement, and income isn't the only incentive.
• johnchristopher 5y ago
  > The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. And yet there is no shortage of t-shirts, shoes and cheap clothing. And parasites do thrive off of the worker's back.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    This is because poor people have to make them or starve. If those countries had safety nets, no more t-shirts for you, since producing these, not to mention cotton farming, is not exciting at all. You just do it for money.
• Synaesthesia 5y ago
  No it just removes one incentive to work, enriching yourself beyond what is needed shouldnt be necessary as an "incentive"
• master255 5y ago
  Why would you think that the economy would be limited to some small value? The value of the maximum limit can be very large. Other than that, the maximum is personal to each resident. It is to reduce the size of giant enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Imagine that these companies would have competitors in the form of ordinary start-ups. The startups would have plenty of money to do that. Maximum restrictions will not reduce the incentive to work in any way. On the contrary, there will be even more incentive to work, because you can make a lot more money and buy a lot more things with that money. The maximum can be from 0 to infinity. No parasitism will occur. Businesses will plan their budgets properly. I think this article is out of your hands. You didn't even realize that the discussion should be in a Telegram group. You read and do not understand what is written. I recommend you reread the article many times before commenting.