6 ms·

Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me? If I do not earn a great amount by giving

by Mave83 5y ago

Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me? If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.

dijit 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing? Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. > If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture! We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live. If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy. The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off. https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That example is too simplistic. The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances). For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?
  - chii 5y ago
    > last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Dazdraperma 5y ago
    Wrong. It's not a football match. There's no upper limit. If some needs are fulfilled, new ones (that used to be unimportant) appear. No enough cars for everyone, you produce cars. If the demand is fulfilled, you produce personal planes, etc. ad infinitum. Wrist watches were once unaccessable and kind of unnecessary for the majority, too. Just like stockings and other things that were once considered luxurous. EVeryone will find their niche.
- bjornsing 5y ago
  But your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk… Your local pizza guy or startup founder, are those the people you call “meat robots”?
  - flopunctro 5y ago
    > your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk Citation needed for the above. Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states. Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    >Your local pizza guy or startup founder Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop! ...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!
    - 5y ago
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Look I think “work to live not live to work” is a great philosophy, and one that probably makes for a fulfilling life. But virtually everything you take for granted about modern civilization only exists because of work-obsessed lunatics. At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present. I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.
  - Azsy 5y ago
    Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits. Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies. Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).
amelius 5y ago
I'd say that a fair economy should always reward those who decide to work more than average. However, those people should not be able to use their extra earned money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  /deleted
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > But who influences regulation and legislation? The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse. So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        Scandinavian countries have quite a lot of transparency and it works fairly well. I agree that humans are pretty corrupt but it can be mitigated in a lot of ways. I live in Scandinavia and yes, our politicians are corrupt as well but the systems and how people vote incentivise them to do the right thing most of the time.
imtringued 5y ago
Your criticism is too simplistic. The fact that you stop working once you reach the cap is actually the point of the cap.
littlestymaar 5y ago
Success. Mots people work hard because they want to succeed, not because they want to get rich. You never become a great athlete for the money, you become a great athlete because you want to win. You never start a business for the money, you go $BIG_CORP if you want money, you start a business because what you want is success. In 90 years the western world has never been as inegalitarian as today, do you think people in the sixties didn't create anything?
- evancox100 5y ago
  If capital gains rates were a lot higher than they are now, we would never have such innovative companies as Apple and Microsoft.
  - tangjurine 5y ago
    I thought most of the innovations those companies use were done by others, and what these companies are really good at is packaging things to make them appealing to the consumer? What happened to the Microsoft hate that used to be on this forum? Calling Microsoft innovative is a little... off, right?
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Poe's law strikes again.

by Mave83 5y ago

dijit 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing? Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. > If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture! We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live. If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.

imtringued 5y ago
>the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory. Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy. The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off. https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  That example is too simplistic. The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances). For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?
- chii 5y ago
  > last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Dazdraperma 5y ago
  Wrong. It's not a football match. There's no upper limit. If some needs are fulfilled, new ones (that used to be unimportant) appear. No enough cars for everyone, you produce cars. If the demand is fulfilled, you produce personal planes, etc. ad infinitum. Wrist watches were once unaccessable and kind of unnecessary for the majority, too. Just like stockings and other things that were once considered luxurous. EVeryone will find their niche.
bjornsing 5y ago
But your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk… Your local pizza guy or startup founder, are those the people you call “meat robots”?
- flopunctro 5y ago
  > your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk Citation needed for the above. Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states. Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Your local pizza guy or startup founder Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop! ...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!
  - 5y ago
dcolkitt 5y ago
Look I think “work to live not live to work” is a great philosophy, and one that probably makes for a fulfilling life. But virtually everything you take for granted about modern civilization only exists because of work-obsessed lunatics. At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present. I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.
- Azsy 5y ago
  Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits. Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies. Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).

amelius 5y ago

I'd say that a fair economy should always reward those who decide to work more than average. However, those people should not be able to use their extra earned money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.

avgcorrection 5y ago
/deleted
- Jensson 5y ago
  > But who influences regulation and legislation? The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse. So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Scandinavian countries have quite a lot of transparency and it works fairly well. I agree that humans are pretty corrupt but it can be mitigated in a lot of ways. I live in Scandinavia and yes, our politicians are corrupt as well but the systems and how people vote incentivise them to do the right thing most of the time.

imtringued 5y ago

Your criticism is too simplistic. The fact that you stop working once you reach the cap is actually the point of the cap.

littlestymaar 5y ago

Success. Mots people work hard because they want to succeed, not because they want to get rich. You never become a great athlete for the money, you become a great athlete because you want to win. You never start a business for the money, you go $BIG_CORP if you want money, you start a business because what you want is success. In 90 years the western world has never been as inegalitarian as today, do you think people in the sixties didn't create anything?

evancox100 5y ago
If capital gains rates were a lot higher than they are now, we would never have such innovative companies as Apple and Microsoft.
- tangjurine 5y ago
  I thought most of the innovations those companies use were done by others, and what these companies are really good at is packaging things to make them appealing to the consumer? What happened to the Microsoft hate that used to be on this forum? Calling Microsoft innovative is a little... off, right?
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Poe's law strikes again.