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>The antidote is simple to prescribe but hard to achieve: it is a return to the goal of efficiency in work—fulfilling whatever needs we have, as a society, with

>The antidote is simple to prescribe but hard to achieve: it is a return to the goal of efficiency in work—fulfilling whatever needs we have, as a society, with the minimal effort required, while leaving the option of more work as a hobby for those who happen to love it. What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated. It's my understanding that we prefer individualism and status. The housing market with reduced interests rates has shown that people don't take the opportunity to work less. Instead, they are willing to max out what they can spend per month. Apart from individual status, don't we want leisure time to be as low as possible to have maximum progress [1]? If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next? [1] Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764663

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next? No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose. Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.
bombcar 4y ago
> What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated. We could experiment by making that available as a baseline - anyone who wants to can sleep in the flophouse, wear the durable clothes, eat the soup kitchen food. And anyone who wants more could continue as they are.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Man, that would be sweet Right now we theoretically have that, but in practice it's a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare to partake in social services, and once you fall of the Employment Train it's extremely hard to get back on unless you have connections or very valuable skills I wonder what society would be like with a perfect safety net.. I'm kinda worried we'd end up with horrible ghettoes full of disgruntled people like the future in Judge Dredd, but I want to believe that society would adjust and we'd value connecting to other people, learning, and enriching ourselves
  - bombcar 4y ago
    We've done it with certain services, we could do it for more - massive soup kitchens open to all for eating anytime, for example. By skipping the "money" part the desire for fraud drops, too.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

> If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next? No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose. Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.

bombcar 4y ago

> What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated. We could experiment by making that available as a baseline - anyone who wants to can sleep in the flophouse, wear the durable clothes, eat the soup kitchen food. And anyone who wants more could continue as they are.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
Man, that would be sweet Right now we theoretically have that, but in practice it's a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare to partake in social services, and once you fall of the Employment Train it's extremely hard to get back on unless you have connections or very valuable skills I wonder what society would be like with a perfect safety net.. I'm kinda worried we'd end up with horrible ghettoes full of disgruntled people like the future in Judge Dredd, but I want to believe that society would adjust and we'd value connecting to other people, learning, and enriching ourselves
- bombcar 4y ago
  We've done it with certain services, we could do it for more - massive soup kitchens open to all for eating anytime, for example. By skipping the "money" part the desire for fraud drops, too.