7 ms·

I'd like an extended version of the story where the businessman realizes he's wrong, invites all his friends to give up their lives in the business-world and re

I'd like an extended version of the story where the businessman realizes he's wrong, invites all his friends to give up their lives in the business-world and revert to subsistence living that provides freedom. Then society collapses because if everyone is doing the bare minimum, there isn't anything left over for basic government services.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Nobody said that the fisherman is engaged in subsistence living. I'd also like a citation on the claim that "basic government services" require profit-making (and presumably taxation to go with it) that is substantively different than the fisherman's approach to life.
- smsm42 3y ago
  Government services obviously require a resource surplus (and some mechanism to direct that surplus to paying for these services, of which taxation is the most common one). If everybody are chill fishermen, there's no surplus - there's no reason for the fisherman to create one.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Surplus can come in the form of a small number of large surpluses, or a large number of small ones. The fisherman is quite capable of being part of the latter example.
    - smsm42 3y ago
      He is capable, but the whole point of the story is that he doesn't want to use this capability, and is lauded for that.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        He doesn't wish to organize his life around maximizing his output. The entire point of the story is to get people to consider to what extent that makes sense, and under what circumstances. If you consider a good life to be precisely how the fisherman already lives, it takes a rather compelling argument (and it make even require compelling force) that he should behave otherwise.
        smsm42 3y ago
        > If you consider a good life to be precisely how the fisherman already lives That's a pretty big if. I'd start with asking how is dental care in his village. Does the village doctor use anesthesia? Would the anesthesiologist accept fish as a payment, and how many fishes a pain-less root canal treatment costs? Maybe after learning the answers to these questions I'd consider some other definition of a good life.
        PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        I strongly encourage you to take a vacation in the Greek Islands, preferably with some incipient emergency dental issue just starting to flare up. I think you'll find the dentist to be just fine.
  - isleyaardvark 3y ago
    The idea that the archetypical businessman in this story is ultimately necessary to provide for government spending is a pretty unique take.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      There was a statistic saying that top 10% of income earners pay something like 80% of all income taxes (not exact numbers but you get the gist).
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income. In a society where few people earned more than Nx the lowest (pick your own N), this distribution of tax origin would look very different. Think of it a different way: suppose a government explicitly targets being able to spend 23% of GDP on government (i.e. publically) chosen goals. How does it collect 23% of GDP? Well, if everyone earned precisely the same, it would collect it equally from each person. On the other hand, if one person earned 99% of GDP and everyone else combined collectively earned the remaining 1%, then obviously the super rich person will be be paying almost all of the tax revenue themselves. The current situation in the US is obviously not this extreme, but the thought experiment shows why it works the way it does. Also important is the concept of marginal utility of income, which describes how each additional currency-unit of income becomes less and less significant as your total income grows. In short, 10%-pay-80% reflects the other decisions that have been made about how the US economy works (or doesn't work), and don't have much to do with taxation in general, or the provision of public services.
        throwawaysalome 3y ago
        You managed to burn another 212 words that added nothing to the statistic you were replying to.
        nickpp 3y ago
        > Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income. Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of productivity and value creation. I've also lived under communism, where they ignored this uneven contribution and tried to squash the incomes uniformly. The result was quite predictable: we were equally starving, of course. Except the nomenklatura, but that's another story.
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    The surplus is created by the environment that grows the fish. Sunlight, plankton, little fish, big fish, plate. Then someone brings in a trawler that scoops up all the fish, and the heretofore independent fishermen now need to do something to convince the seafood company to give them the fish sticks now pooped out by the ship. So the fishermen become tax accountants and baristas, to provide services for the fish company's clerks. Net, there is now more economic activity and more GDP. Whereas before, the country only produced as much fish as the fishermen needed to eat (and some surplus to sell at the local market), now it also produces tax services, and espresso services, and fishstick exports. This lasts for about a decade until the fish stocks are depleted. The fishermen, who used to live in bamboo huts they'd rebuild themselves every few years, now live in concrete apartment blocks, and they can no longer afford rent.
- late2part 3y ago
  Please cite your assertion "Nobody said that the fisherman is engaged in subsistence living."
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherman/ https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
leobg 3y ago
Society would collapse also of everyone decided to do internet marketing. Or baking. Or anything, for that matter - since society requires that different people make different choices.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >Society would collapse also of everyone decided to do internet marketing. Sometimes it feels like we are already half way there.
  - leobg 3y ago
    Exactly. (Especially now that ChatGPT makes those people even more productive.)
raincole 3y ago
The moral of story isn't you should be a fisherman or something. It's that you shouldn't change your career (that works for you perfectly) just because someone who looks successful told you so.
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  Oh I do understand the moral of the story. But to me it's not a very practical lesson. Perhaps the software developers here at HN could realistically coast in life, but to the vast majority of people who want 2 kids (and a good education for them), want to travel, want to own a home, have enough money to hire a good lawyer in case someone screws them over or are falsely accused of a crime, it's not really realistic to work just enough to get by and relax with free time.
jerrre 3y ago
is the businessman friends with everyone in society?
throwuwu 3y ago
God forbid they’d have to cut the military budget and fire some bureaucrats.
- cyclotron3k 3y ago
  They cut things like schools, health care and welfare long before the military budget saw any cuts

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

Nobody said that the fisherman is engaged in subsistence living. I'd also like a citation on the claim that "basic government services" require profit-making (and presumably taxation to go with it) that is substantively different than the fisherman's approach to life.

smsm42 3y ago
Government services obviously require a resource surplus (and some mechanism to direct that surplus to paying for these services, of which taxation is the most common one). If everybody are chill fishermen, there's no surplus - there's no reason for the fisherman to create one.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Surplus can come in the form of a small number of large surpluses, or a large number of small ones. The fisherman is quite capable of being part of the latter example.
  - smsm42 3y ago
    He is capable, but the whole point of the story is that he doesn't want to use this capability, and is lauded for that.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      He doesn't wish to organize his life around maximizing his output. The entire point of the story is to get people to consider to what extent that makes sense, and under what circumstances. If you consider a good life to be precisely how the fisherman already lives, it takes a rather compelling argument (and it make even require compelling force) that he should behave otherwise.
      - smsm42 3y ago
        > If you consider a good life to be precisely how the fisherman already lives That's a pretty big if. I'd start with asking how is dental care in his village. Does the village doctor use anesthesia? Would the anesthesiologist accept fish as a payment, and how many fishes a pain-less root canal treatment costs? Maybe after learning the answers to these questions I'd consider some other definition of a good life.
        PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        I strongly encourage you to take a vacation in the Greek Islands, preferably with some incipient emergency dental issue just starting to flare up. I think you'll find the dentist to be just fine.
- isleyaardvark 3y ago
  The idea that the archetypical businessman in this story is ultimately necessary to provide for government spending is a pretty unique take.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    There was a statistic saying that top 10% of income earners pay something like 80% of all income taxes (not exact numbers but you get the gist).
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income. In a society where few people earned more than Nx the lowest (pick your own N), this distribution of tax origin would look very different. Think of it a different way: suppose a government explicitly targets being able to spend 23% of GDP on government (i.e. publically) chosen goals. How does it collect 23% of GDP? Well, if everyone earned precisely the same, it would collect it equally from each person. On the other hand, if one person earned 99% of GDP and everyone else combined collectively earned the remaining 1%, then obviously the super rich person will be be paying almost all of the tax revenue themselves. The current situation in the US is obviously not this extreme, but the thought experiment shows why it works the way it does. Also important is the concept of marginal utility of income, which describes how each additional currency-unit of income becomes less and less significant as your total income grows. In short, 10%-pay-80% reflects the other decisions that have been made about how the US economy works (or doesn't work), and don't have much to do with taxation in general, or the provision of public services.
      - throwawaysalome 3y ago
        You managed to burn another 212 words that added nothing to the statistic you were replying to.
      - nickpp 3y ago
        > Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income. Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of productivity and value creation. I've also lived under communism, where they ignored this uneven contribution and tried to squash the incomes uniformly. The result was quite predictable: we were equally starving, of course. Except the nomenklatura, but that's another story.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  The surplus is created by the environment that grows the fish. Sunlight, plankton, little fish, big fish, plate. Then someone brings in a trawler that scoops up all the fish, and the heretofore independent fishermen now need to do something to convince the seafood company to give them the fish sticks now pooped out by the ship. So the fishermen become tax accountants and baristas, to provide services for the fish company's clerks. Net, there is now more economic activity and more GDP. Whereas before, the country only produced as much fish as the fishermen needed to eat (and some surplus to sell at the local market), now it also produces tax services, and espresso services, and fishstick exports. This lasts for about a decade until the fish stocks are depleted. The fishermen, who used to live in bamboo huts they'd rebuild themselves every few years, now live in concrete apartment blocks, and they can no longer afford rent.
late2part 3y ago
Please cite your assertion "Nobody said that the fisherman is engaged in subsistence living."
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherman/ https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...

leobg 3y ago

Society would collapse also of everyone decided to do internet marketing. Or baking. Or anything, for that matter - since society requires that different people make different choices.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>Society would collapse also of everyone decided to do internet marketing. Sometimes it feels like we are already half way there.
- leobg 3y ago
  Exactly. (Especially now that ChatGPT makes those people even more productive.)

raincole 3y ago

The moral of story isn't you should be a fisherman or something. It's that you shouldn't change your career (that works for you perfectly) just because someone who looks successful told you so.

oatmeal1 3y ago
Oh I do understand the moral of the story. But to me it's not a very practical lesson. Perhaps the software developers here at HN could realistically coast in life, but to the vast majority of people who want 2 kids (and a good education for them), want to travel, want to own a home, have enough money to hire a good lawyer in case someone screws them over or are falsely accused of a crime, it's not really realistic to work just enough to get by and relax with free time.

jerrre 3y ago

is the businessman friends with everyone in society?

throwuwu 3y ago

God forbid they’d have to cut the military budget and fire some bureaucrats.

cyclotron3k 3y ago
They cut things like schools, health care and welfare long before the military budget saw any cuts