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> We could have a society where the average person works ten hours a week ... and owns a home. I don't think 10 hours a week on average is enough hours to grow

> We could have a society where the average person works ten hours a week ... and owns a home. I don't think 10 hours a week on average is enough hours to grow the food to feed everyone, or keep any other part of the economy running. There's probably truth in some of the other parts of what you're saying but this, no way. Maybe 30 hours might be believable.

timschmidt 2y ago
Modern tractors literally drive themselves and automatically notify the manufacturer when in need of service. They're also enormous. Cows allowed to milk themselves via automated milking apparatus actually produce more milk and seem happier. Societal investment could easily bring these technologies to every farm.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  At least for staple/commodity/bulk crops. Not necessarily desirable for every type of produce or animal agriculture. Automated chicken factories are also enormous and remarkably light on labour input, but there are other consequences.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    It’s funny this comes up because I’m designing an open source solar powered farming robot as a community oriented engineering project specifically to address the long tail of specialty crops: https://youtu.be/MWDnCemVpxI https://youtu.be/MWDnCemVpxI
Earw0rm 2y ago
Depends how you define work, and how it's divided up. A remarkable amount of labour goes into generating income to pay for care, for example. Both people saving for their own in later life (or insurance to pay for it), and working to pay for childcare so they can work. And a sizeable amount also just to facilitate the work itself. Car payments so you can get to work. Student loan repayments on your training, and so on. Paying over the odds for a city apartment because that's where the work is. None of this can be magicked away of course. But the amount of hours that directly address economic need or generate discretionary income is a lot less than 40.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Oh it’s absolutely enough. It’s hard to fathom just how much wealth we actually have in this world, just not evenly distributed. If we had community ownership of the means of production, wealth would be distributed much more throughout the population instead of concentrated at the very top. Many things would change because of this. For one, significantly less unnecessary stuff would be produced. Huge sectors of our economy are devoted to producing junk that is designed to make someone lots of money and then break quickly. A community oriented economy would produce more durable and useful goods meant to be repaired and upgraded instead of thrown away. It does not necessarily take any extra manufacturing capacity to make things repairable, but they would last much longer. Because of this you can run the same manufacturing capacity less and still provide for everyone. There’s also much more of an incentive to automate when the choice is literally build a robot or you have to do the labor yourself, so we’d see more pressures towards automation. Actually this is something Noam Chomsky talked about in 1976: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI It’s difficult to grasp the degree to which the economy would change if we had community oriented production. It’s not a simple incremental change, but a massive improvement in conditions for the average person. Another angle to think about it is like this: imagine a world where all school children are taught how to properly participate in a cooperate economy from youth. We all learn how to write proposals and vote in regular meetings and work out disputes and by the time we’re adults we’re running big cooperative organizations smoothly. Okay now imagine a place like Amazon starts up as an co-op and all the workers are sharing in the profits. Let’s say they’re just as good as Jeff Bezos at running the company, but there’s no Jeff Bezos to absorb all the profits? How much would each worker earn? Now in a truly cooperative economy there wouldn’t be poor third world workers to exploit for profit the way Jeff Bezos did so there wouldn’t be such massive windfall profits available, but it’s worth briefly considering how much each Amazon worker would be worth if they actually earned their fair share of the value they’re producing. By the way the Black Panther Party ran a community learning center for children that focused on cooperation back in 1977. Imagine if all our schools were like this: https://youtu.be/9dYsjDqUdr0 https://youtu.be/9dYsjDqUdr0
chgs 2y ago
Farming is about 1% of gdp in the west. So you’re talking half an hour per week on average.

timschmidt 2y ago

Modern tractors literally drive themselves and automatically notify the manufacturer when in need of service. They're also enormous. Cows allowed to milk themselves via automated milking apparatus actually produce more milk and seem happier. Societal investment could easily bring these technologies to every farm.

Earw0rm 2y ago
At least for staple/commodity/bulk crops. Not necessarily desirable for every type of produce or animal agriculture. Automated chicken factories are also enormous and remarkably light on labour input, but there are other consequences.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  It’s funny this comes up because I’m designing an open source solar powered farming robot as a community oriented engineering project specifically to address the long tail of specialty crops: https://youtu.be/MWDnCemVpxI https://youtu.be/MWDnCemVpxI

Earw0rm 2y ago

Depends how you define work, and how it's divided up. A remarkable amount of labour goes into generating income to pay for care, for example. Both people saving for their own in later life (or insurance to pay for it), and working to pay for childcare so they can work. And a sizeable amount also just to facilitate the work itself. Car payments so you can get to work. Student loan repayments on your training, and so on. Paying over the odds for a city apartment because that's where the work is. None of this can be magicked away of course. But the amount of hours that directly address economic need or generate discretionary income is a lot less than 40.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago

Oh it’s absolutely enough. It’s hard to fathom just how much wealth we actually have in this world, just not evenly distributed. If we had community ownership of the means of production, wealth would be distributed much more throughout the population instead of concentrated at the very top. Many things would change because of this. For one, significantly less unnecessary stuff would be produced. Huge sectors of our economy are devoted to producing junk that is designed to make someone lots of money and then break quickly. A community oriented economy would produce more durable and useful goods meant to be repaired and upgraded instead of thrown away. It does not necessarily take any extra manufacturing capacity to make things repairable, but they would last much longer. Because of this you can run the same manufacturing capacity less and still provide for everyone. There’s also much more of an incentive to automate when the choice is literally build a robot or you have to do the labor yourself, so we’d see more pressures towards automation. Actually this is something Noam Chomsky talked about in 1976: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI It’s difficult to grasp the degree to which the economy would change if we had community oriented production. It’s not a simple incremental change, but a massive improvement in conditions for the average person. Another angle to think about it is like this: imagine a world where all school children are taught how to properly participate in a cooperate economy from youth. We all learn how to write proposals and vote in regular meetings and work out disputes and by the time we’re adults we’re running big cooperative organizations smoothly. Okay now imagine a place like Amazon starts up as an co-op and all the workers are sharing in the profits. Let’s say they’re just as good as Jeff Bezos at running the company, but there’s no Jeff Bezos to absorb all the profits? How much would each worker earn? Now in a truly cooperative economy there wouldn’t be poor third world workers to exploit for profit the way Jeff Bezos did so there wouldn’t be such massive windfall profits available, but it’s worth briefly considering how much each Amazon worker would be worth if they actually earned their fair share of the value they’re producing. By the way the Black Panther Party ran a community learning center for children that focused on cooperation back in 1977. Imagine if all our schools were like this: https://youtu.be/9dYsjDqUdr0 https://youtu.be/9dYsjDqUdr0

chgs 2y ago

Farming is about 1% of gdp in the west. So you’re talking half an hour per week on average.