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"Food and shelter are abundant." Only because somebody made them by working Monday to Friday. That somebody could make less by working Monday to Tuesday. Food

"Food and shelter are abundant." Only because somebody made them by working Monday to Friday. That somebody could make less by working Monday to Tuesday. Food and shelter would be less abundant and the person currently working a full week to produce the surplus would instead have the rest of the week to themselves. The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as morally it should. Now you have changed the frame of the question: how do you persuade those highly skilled people who have the capacity to operate machinery that produces the basic surplus to give up the free time that by right is theirs and produce that basic surplus? We may have a magic money tree, but we don't have a magic porridge pot.

fifticon 5y ago
the wealth piled up with people like elon musk and jeff bezos indicate this is not what is being solved or handled here. The 188b$ of Bezos and 264b$ of Musk are clearly not dedicated to providing me with hamburgers and sleeping quarters. If I divided those 452b$ amongst 334m americans, I'd get around 1300$ per head. Though net worth is not the same as yearly income, I note that Musk's 264b$ represent 5.600 times the average american's yearly income. As I see it, a lot of that "necessary work to provide food and shelter", that you refer to, is not spent doing that, but instead spent piling money on top of people like Musk and Bezos. I agree with the people that think we could still handle the work required for 'food and shelter', without all the necessary work yielded to enrich our billionaires. What we currently have, and have had for most of human history, is feudalism under many different names. We may currently have a much more humane treatment of our thralls, but we have an entitled 'nobility' profiting off the work of others, as much as at any time. It is much like peasants 500 years ago, who could handily themselves live off what their farms produced, but for some reason had to pass on the major part of what their work produced, so that the lord could 'protect' them against being beaten up by the neighbour lord (and, incidentally, against being indiscriminately beaten by his own men, too). Currently we organise our Lords through capitalism.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  >Currently we organise our Lords through capitalism. And that's how I want it. I may have a low chance of winning but nobody argues against my right to throw my hat in the ring if I want to rise above my station. Nobody but the anticapitalists that is.
  - mlatu 5y ago
    That's what they want you to believe, but your hat needs to be at least THIS big in order to not just evaporate when it lands in the ring. Good luck playing against the house. I'd much rather demolish this casino and put up a soupkitchen instead. I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning". What do you win anyways? Can you hug your profits? Can they thank you for your efforts? I'm not convinced that capitalism is the best way to run this planet, but certainly one of the better ways to ruin it, this way at least those already well off, will have it nice until the end, hordes of immigrants fleeing from droughts and >50°C around the equator? who cares, they'll drown in the mediteranean sea or otherwise be hindered from reaching the "good" parts in europe.. The world is fucked, if you dont see it already as such: capitalism is barbarism. You don't really need to involve immigrants even, just look at industrial livestock farming. There was an article recently, that at least 65 different species of animals can laugh. I used to laugh at vegans not eating meat, I mean, it's just animals..., but now? What makes US so special? Why is the laughter of our children worth more than that of some cows or chicken? How can I enjoy a steak without thinking about whether or not this animal had a good life? It died so i may eat it, but why did it live in the first place? Just to be eaten? A horrible thought. And then, why do i live? Just so I can feed my landlord? Are we just here to produce abundance for those who have all the money/power/assets/rights? I want to see the (capitalist) world burn and I want you to want that too, so we can build a better world together
    - Infernal 5y ago
      > I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning" Where do you believe the food, clothing, housing, and medical care/technology will come from in this hypothetical?
andrewjl 5y ago
> Only because somebody made them by working Monday to Friday. That somebody could make less by working Monday to Tuesday. Food and shelter would be less abundant and the person currently working a full week to produce the surplus would instead have the rest of the week to themselves. The industrial revolution did not change the number of days in a week. > The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as morally it should. This is false in general. Quite a few folks providing key industrial inputs, like cotton for the first industrial revolution, received zero of those accruals for centuries.
jokoon 5y ago
Few people work to provide food and shelter, that's what I meant. We do have a magic porridge pot surplus. Just look around you.
- Kalium 5y ago
  You are absolutely correct. This is true. There are comparatively few people who work to provide food and shelter. That said, when I look around me I see massive complexity to accomplish the seeming of a magic porridge pot surplus. I think it may be possible to understate what goes in to producing these things. The food production system requires a whole series of industrialized inputs to work at this level of labor efficiency, so we need to keep those and supporting systems. Food production systems also need food distribution systems, which means ways to harvest, process, package, store, and transport food. This requires its own logistical chains and their supporting systems. Now we're up to including a bunch of heavy industry, some mining, steelmaking, a cross-continental rail system, international shipping, and last mile logistics. We haven't even gone into how much of this is specialized labor requiring significant training - a lot of it - and what it would take to adjust the amount of work per person involved or spread it over more people. We haven't looked at housing, its supply chain(s), the educational systems required to train specialists, health care, or administrative systems. I am in awe of the complexity that goes into making the magic porridge pot work.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    Thank you for breaking this down. Just because we see a stack of bananas at whole foods, doesn't mean that it was easy to produce
  - jokoon 5y ago
    We just disagree
- neilwilson 5y ago
  "Few people work to provide food and shelter, that's what I meant." And they could work less by not producing a surplus. Which is what I meant. The can produce enough for themselves and their machine suppliers by Tuesday afternoon. And that's all the people they need to look after. As usual with anarchic ideas you are assuming altruism on the part of others. The surplus doesn't need to be produced. The people producing it currently could just work less, which would be fair since that means productivity improvements accrue to them - not you.
joshgrib 5y ago
I think you're sneaking in some assumptions here that people just develop these skills within themselves and have the same opportunity to do so as anyone else. If you start the clock with them already having those skills and other people not then it makes sense, but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills. However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither of which you have any control over. I don't see why someone should have full rights over whatever their output is when they have no control over the input. If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. The public could then decide they should get a larger share for some reason(we generally do this with tax policy), but I don't see how they could have any moral claim to it
- neilwilson 5y ago
  "but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills." They owe it to the retired, who are the ones who gave them their skills and passed on the capital legacy they maintained. And we have a process that handles that. It's called a "pension system". The "owe it back to society" bit is already captured by the pension system. You don't get to spend it again.
- samhw 5y ago
  > If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on bad counterfactual reasoning. Look for proximate causes: in other words, necessary and sufficient conditions.
  - joshgrib 5y ago
    I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on. I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people". I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that. In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system. Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!
analognoise 5y ago
"The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as morally it should." This argument is not only not what happens in practice, it is a bold assertion for morality. What we actually have is that a class of people have infinite free time because people believe this lie - the "Job creator class" myth. The same job creators that need to be bailed out (with our money) every time the economy sneezes. There's nothing morally correct or right about working under the assumption of homelessness or starvation - it's a threat that doesn't need to exist, to "produce" more. More of what? We already throw out tons and tons of food to keep prices at certain places for the sake of farmers and "the economy". The whole thing is artifice upon artifice - thousands of empty vacation homes, workers living with multiple people. What is the point of all this production if the gains don't ever actually reach the people doing the work?

fifticon 5y ago

the wealth piled up with people like elon musk and jeff bezos indicate this is not what is being solved or handled here. The 188b$ of Bezos and 264b$ of Musk are clearly not dedicated to providing me with hamburgers and sleeping quarters. If I divided those 452b$ amongst 334m americans, I'd get around 1300$ per head. Though net worth is not the same as yearly income, I note that Musk's 264b$ represent 5.600 times the average american's yearly income. As I see it, a lot of that "necessary work to provide food and shelter", that you refer to, is not spent doing that, but instead spent piling money on top of people like Musk and Bezos. I agree with the people that think we could still handle the work required for 'food and shelter', without all the necessary work yielded to enrich our billionaires. What we currently have, and have had for most of human history, is feudalism under many different names. We may currently have a much more humane treatment of our thralls, but we have an entitled 'nobility' profiting off the work of others, as much as at any time. It is much like peasants 500 years ago, who could handily themselves live off what their farms produced, but for some reason had to pass on the major part of what their work produced, so that the lord could 'protect' them against being beaten up by the neighbour lord (and, incidentally, against being indiscriminately beaten by his own men, too). Currently we organise our Lords through capitalism.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
>Currently we organise our Lords through capitalism. And that's how I want it. I may have a low chance of winning but nobody argues against my right to throw my hat in the ring if I want to rise above my station. Nobody but the anticapitalists that is.
- mlatu 5y ago
  That's what they want you to believe, but your hat needs to be at least THIS big in order to not just evaporate when it lands in the ring. Good luck playing against the house. I'd much rather demolish this casino and put up a soupkitchen instead. I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning". What do you win anyways? Can you hug your profits? Can they thank you for your efforts? I'm not convinced that capitalism is the best way to run this planet, but certainly one of the better ways to ruin it, this way at least those already well off, will have it nice until the end, hordes of immigrants fleeing from droughts and >50°C around the equator? who cares, they'll drown in the mediteranean sea or otherwise be hindered from reaching the "good" parts in europe.. The world is fucked, if you dont see it already as such: capitalism is barbarism. You don't really need to involve immigrants even, just look at industrial livestock farming. There was an article recently, that at least 65 different species of animals can laugh. I used to laugh at vegans not eating meat, I mean, it's just animals..., but now? What makes US so special? Why is the laughter of our children worth more than that of some cows or chicken? How can I enjoy a steak without thinking about whether or not this animal had a good life? It died so i may eat it, but why did it live in the first place? Just to be eaten? A horrible thought. And then, why do i live? Just so I can feed my landlord? Are we just here to produce abundance for those who have all the money/power/assets/rights? I want to see the (capitalist) world burn and I want you to want that too, so we can build a better world together
  - Infernal 5y ago
    > I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning" Where do you believe the food, clothing, housing, and medical care/technology will come from in this hypothetical?

andrewjl 5y ago

> Only because somebody made them by working Monday to Friday. That somebody could make less by working Monday to Tuesday. Food and shelter would be less abundant and the person currently working a full week to produce the surplus would instead have the rest of the week to themselves. The industrial revolution did not change the number of days in a week. > The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as morally it should. This is false in general. Quite a few folks providing key industrial inputs, like cotton for the first industrial revolution, received zero of those accruals for centuries.

jokoon 5y ago

Few people work to provide food and shelter, that's what I meant. We do have a magic porridge pot surplus. Just look around you.

Kalium 5y ago
You are absolutely correct. This is true. There are comparatively few people who work to provide food and shelter. That said, when I look around me I see massive complexity to accomplish the seeming of a magic porridge pot surplus. I think it may be possible to understate what goes in to producing these things. The food production system requires a whole series of industrialized inputs to work at this level of labor efficiency, so we need to keep those and supporting systems. Food production systems also need food distribution systems, which means ways to harvest, process, package, store, and transport food. This requires its own logistical chains and their supporting systems. Now we're up to including a bunch of heavy industry, some mining, steelmaking, a cross-continental rail system, international shipping, and last mile logistics. We haven't even gone into how much of this is specialized labor requiring significant training - a lot of it - and what it would take to adjust the amount of work per person involved or spread it over more people. We haven't looked at housing, its supply chain(s), the educational systems required to train specialists, health care, or administrative systems. I am in awe of the complexity that goes into making the magic porridge pot work.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  Thank you for breaking this down. Just because we see a stack of bananas at whole foods, doesn't mean that it was easy to produce
- jokoon 5y ago
  We just disagree
neilwilson 5y ago
"Few people work to provide food and shelter, that's what I meant." And they could work less by not producing a surplus. Which is what I meant. The can produce enough for themselves and their machine suppliers by Tuesday afternoon. And that's all the people they need to look after. As usual with anarchic ideas you are assuming altruism on the part of others. The surplus doesn't need to be produced. The people producing it currently could just work less, which would be fair since that means productivity improvements accrue to them - not you.

joshgrib 5y ago

I think you're sneaking in some assumptions here that people just develop these skills within themselves and have the same opportunity to do so as anyone else. If you start the clock with them already having those skills and other people not then it makes sense, but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills. However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither of which you have any control over. I don't see why someone should have full rights over whatever their output is when they have no control over the input. If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. The public could then decide they should get a larger share for some reason(we generally do this with tax policy), but I don't see how they could have any moral claim to it

neilwilson 5y ago
"but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills." They owe it to the retired, who are the ones who gave them their skills and passed on the capital legacy they maintained. And we have a process that handles that. It's called a "pension system". The "owe it back to society" bit is already captured by the pension system. You don't get to spend it again.
samhw 5y ago
> If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on bad counterfactual reasoning. Look for proximate causes: in other words, necessary and sufficient conditions.
- joshgrib 5y ago
  I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on. I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people". I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that. In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system. Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!

analognoise 5y ago

"The productivity, and the free time, would accrue to those expending the effort of production - as morally it should." This argument is not only not what happens in practice, it is a bold assertion for morality. What we actually have is that a class of people have infinite free time because people believe this lie - the "Job creator class" myth. The same job creators that need to be bailed out (with our money) every time the economy sneezes. There's nothing morally correct or right about working under the assumption of homelessness or starvation - it's a threat that doesn't need to exist, to "produce" more. More of what? We already throw out tons and tons of food to keep prices at certain places for the sake of farmers and "the economy". The whole thing is artifice upon artifice - thousands of empty vacation homes, workers living with multiple people. What is the point of all this production if the gains don't ever actually reach the people doing the work?