2 ms·
"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively. On t
by PeterisP 4y ago
"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively.
On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
- tomp 4y agoSure but then you don’t need wealth redistribution, because everything is dirt cheap. The correct mental model isn’t “communism” or “wealth distribution”, but instead “salt”. Countries used to go to war because of salt. But now technology has eroded its value so much, restaurants are literally giving it away.
- PeterisP 4y agoArtificial scarcity is a thing, so something being dirt cheap to produce doesn't necessarily mean that it will be actually affordable, and in the current economic environment there seems to be sufficient motivation for powerful people to try and make various monopolies based on capital-gated barriers of entry, even if the marginal cost approaches zero; so I'd expect that the default scenario is not like "salt". Getting to a mental model "like salt" seems to be a reasonable outcome in the long run, but I'm afraid that it would take some significant pressure from the masses to get from here to there.