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It's worth reflecting that the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0, giving them no leverage at anything and no prospect of competi

• 11101010001100 4y ago
  So we should just hope? Sounds like a good plan.
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  > I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing. If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
  • YellOh 4y ago
    Money is also useful for other measures, such as access to food & housing. I'd prefer a person with no economic value still be able to access commodities that do have economic value.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      Access to food and housing have economic value; that's why they cost money. That doesn't mean you can't give people money or housing; again, you'd just be valuing them on something other than their economic output.
  • goawaythrwaway 4y ago
    > If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value. Yes exactly, and to all those whiners complaining about not being able to put food on the table whilst I and my schoolmates at Shortridge Academy each have trusts worth more than their expected lifetime earnings I say: Though your life might have "value" to a select few (like your parents) it unfortunately doesn't have much economic value to those who actually measure such things (like my parents.) It would behoove you to take some personal responsibility for your station in life. I certainly take responsibility for mine, and that, in my clearly valuable opinion, makes all the difference between us.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      Well-worded bad faith insinuation parody is still just bad faith insinuation. Why dress up a bad thing instead of doing a good thing?
• vishnugupta 4y ago
  > ...have skills worth very close to $0.. I would rephrase this. They are stuck in their circumstances which forces them to survive on a few cents a day. MNCs like Nike take advantage of this by getting their goods manufactured in Bangladesh at next to no cost and sell them for thousands of dollars. If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US I am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is indeed not $0.
  • sjducb 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand capitalism. The market value of their skills is amlost $0 There are other ways of valuing those people, but you have to break out of a capitalist framework if you want to value them at more than a few dollars a day.
    • FredPret 4y ago
      [flagged]
    • amflare 4y ago
      There are very few economic frameworks that actually value people at all. And unless your idea is to replace capitalism with an agrarian structure, then almost anything else you could suggest would see people as an expense, which is the economic opposite of value.
      • noelherrick 4y ago
        If you really think that, then shouldn't you abolish economics? If a system doesn't value humans, and in fact in its history has proven it will turn babies into profit (lookin' at you Nestle), it's anti-human and as a human, it's immoral to support that system.
      • WA 4y ago
        Of the few, which would be one?
        • 4y ago
• kingstoned 4y ago
  The bottom billion are mostly self-sufficient farmers or hunter-gatherers. Money is only relevant in an interconnected modern economy. A small tribe of hunter-gatherers or a small farming village has a GDP of 0, but they have the basics covered.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    There are basically zero hunter-gatherers left except in national parks in a few places; like elephants and tigers the farmers and settlers tend to hunt them to extinction given the chance. Even the bottom billion are probably a lot more incorporated into the state than you would expect.
  • sjducb 4y ago
    This is true until they need something from the outside world. Having no money is a problem if you need a doctor.
    • slothtrop 4y ago
      They (hunter-gatherers) would be the first to tell you they don't need something from the outside world.
      • shellfishgene 4y ago
        The hunter-gatherer who finds out it takes a dentist 20 minutes to make his year long toothache go away will quickly disagree.
        • slothtrop 4y ago
          There are cruder means to get rid of tooth aches. You can't think of a better example than that?
      • sjducb 4y ago
        I just visited a tea plantation where the average salary was about $2.50/day and people were raising kids on that. The average per person is less than $2/day. Those people know about the outside world, send their kids to school and are aware that they can't afford to go to the doctor.
• xwdv 4y ago
  Be careful about wishing people were valued independently of economic output, because the value judgement might not go the way you think. It could easily be concluded that most people are a net negative to the world, and that we should discourage more of them from being created. This could mean forced sterilization in order to qualify for UBI or welfare programs, etc (which is hardly a bad idea, but one that the masses may object to).
  • quonn 4y ago
    No it can‘t, because nobody would vote for that.
    • Phlarp 4y ago
      I can think of 75 million or so Americans that would vote for it loudly if the right politicians came out in support of the idea.
    • xwdv 4y ago
      I would vote for it in an instant. Population control is not something that we can just leave to the pages of sci-fi anymore. The increasing fragility of our planet and societies means we simply won’t have the luxury of letting populations grow without limit for much longer, without facing disastrous consequences. And besides, the idea of controlling people’s reproductive capacities is not without modern precedent.
      • thealchemistdev 4y ago
        No need to vote. The easiest way to reduce your overall population is to educate your female segment. See every country with a birth rate below their replacement level. This is not a value judgement, it just happens every time.
      • digging 4y ago
        Most countries already practice population control through economic incentives. Tax credits, free child care, and other initiatives can increase population growth. Educating and employing female citizens, giving out contraceptives, and other initiatives can decrease population growth. There's no need for sterilization measures at the moment (even though they have also been practiced for generations). And I would urge you to keep in mind what the actual outcomes of aggressive population control would actually be. (I'll give you a hint: it's ethnic cleansing and targeting the most vulnerable peoples.)
• slothtrop 4y ago
  There's a reason that the poorest countries trade the least. There's scarcely any economy. > how to value people independently of their economic output. You can't assign an economic value to people, and I suspect that's what you're alluding to - that people aren't valued unless they are compensated X amount. UBI makes this a moot point. There's no tangible actionable meaning to "valuing people", systematically, otherwise.
• cjcole 4y ago
  Then it's a shame that society has largely decided to discard as outdated longstanding philosophies whose tenets do teach the intrinsic value of each human independent of their economic output. https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/imago-body.html https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/imago-body.html But pushing aside those outmoded ways of thinking did make it easier to sell people useless goods and services which can't fill the hole where dignity and self-respect could instead reside. And on top we've built the artifice of "social" media (the most shameless oxymoron imaginable) producing sufficient anxiety ensuring that the hole remains unfilled despite all effort. This is a frightening confluence.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  The middle-class has always had a cavalier attitude about labor-saving innovations that made the lower class unemployable. Now that they are in chopping block, I predict that we will see an increasing interest on Marxism amongst the laptop class.
  • fundad 4y ago
    We're the vacuum cleaner class. We can't afford a maid but can afford the nicest vacuum cleaner in the store.
    • tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
      The iRobot vacuum cleaner class. ;@)
      • fundad 4y ago
        The Amazon SpiRobot
  • stinkytaco 4y ago
    I started to really notice this during the pandemic, when pieces about tracking software for work-from-home employees started to pop up. Being constantly measured is nothing new to service workers, call centers, delivery drivers or any number of other industries, but it felt like only when it started to impact middle class people who read think pieces did it really get traction as an issue.
  • tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
    In America, it won't happen because they'll believe it's their fault as ashamed, aspirational billionaires. Americans are nothing like the French.
• oh_sigh 4y ago
  It's not their skills - it is their skills + their environment. If you dropped a lot of those billion people in America, a lot of them would be hireable at minimum wage or more.
• mk89 4y ago
  > I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output. The cynical in me thinks that all you need is another world war to fix the overly crowded planet. Then things will be quite balanced again and you can keep on judging people by what you call the economic output.
  • mucle6 4y ago
    citation needed for overly crowded Wishing others were dead is a dangerous philosophy
    • pixl97 4y ago
      As they say, wishing others dead is a great way to become dead yourself. It's insane that we live in a world with enough technological progress that we can easily feed, cloth, and shelter everyone, yet a huge portion of us are so greedy that we don't want to see that happen because it might mean one penny less for ourselves.
      • noelherrick 4y ago
        "Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich." - Anon. I first began to encounter this when I as an idealistic teenager looked into why poverty/hunger still existed when we had enough food/money to wipe it out. Aid to low income countries often wouldn't get to the intended recipient. Their leaders would live like kings while kids would die from malnutrition. It just baffled me (still does) how someone could be so selfish. Then I realized we in the US have it just around the corner. I knew someone who worked at a "remedial" high school where the kids struggled with hunger, homelessness, and addiction. All the schools in the area would shuffle any kid in danger of flunking to make sure their numbers looked good. They lived in neighborhoods I as a middle-class person would never venture into. We just do a good job sweeping massive poverty in the US under the rug. This was a middle of the road state - then you look at states such as Mississippi and you wonder how we can live with ourselves.
• thih9 4y ago
  Is this bigger than computers / web / smartphones? Many people lost their clients and had to change the way they work because of the above. The market has adjusted. Then again, it all happened in a relatively long timeframe. Whereas here we got access to chatgpt pretty much overnight.
  • tedivm 4y ago
    There's a difference between "the market has adjusted" and "society is better now". The market adjusted by increasing inequality, reducing wages, and shrinking the middle class (especially in specific regions). The fact that the market adjusts isn't a good metric to use for the healthiness of a society.
    • thih9 4y ago
      Which regions? Are we sure there is causality? I meant job market, i.e. which jobs are in demand (e.g. social media manager) and which aren’t (e.g. analog camera operator). Is society worse after that changes?
• majani 4y ago
  The way I see it, AI is a nifty tool, like a calculator. Who was disrupted by the calculator? It wasn't the peasants in the fields. It was the people with the ability to do mental sums on the fly. Such people went from having the king's ear to being parlor tricks on variety shows. Same thing in the case of AI. We're about to see a lot of so-called 10x developers become commoditized.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    How you can have the right comparison but come to the completely wrong conclusion is baffling. 10x developers won't become a commodity. 0.1x developers will.
• cyanydeez 4y ago
  Unfortunately, wealth inequality will run faster than dispossession and will outstrip the political will to do any better than the last decade.
• kristianp 4y ago
  I think describing the value as "very close to 0" distorts things somewhat. The global extreme poverty line is $2.15 per person per day. If someone earns 10x that in a poor country, it may be enough to feed yourself and even send your kids to school. There's lots of room near $0. Then hopefully middle class can be generated in a poor country by modernisation and education.