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Probably not "incredibly stupid" But, "the economy" is generally just a descriptor for what people need/want, and what they're willing to do for it. A phrase

Probably not "incredibly stupid" But, "the economy" is generally just a descriptor for what people need/want, and what they're willing to do for it. A phrase like "slaves of the economy", with the implication that someone should be entitled to escape that condition, is about as ridiculous as thinking you are a "slave to nutrients" or a "slave to oxygen" or any other physical constraint. You can't escape it; you have to eat--what are you willing to do to get food? However, what I think you're probably more upset about, and what you probably should instead be phrasing it as, is economic manipulation. That is something that can legitimately be unjust. Power and information are some tools to manipulate or benefit from economic conditions to a greater extent than others, and therefore have more boats or leisure time or political positions (or food or N95 masks or jobs etc etc)

leereeves 1y ago
When someone complains about "the economy", they aren't complaining about the abstract idea of an economy, they're complaining about a particular economy (usually the one they live in). One could literally be a "slave to this economy" in a slave-based economy, or figuratively in an economy where other people own the land (for example) and force them to work.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- spwa4 1y ago
  But that makes these claims of "slavery" even more absurd. Would you have to do more or less living as a subsistence farmer? Would you have better or worse quality of life? That's an easy one: no way in hell, it'd be SO much worse. Our society can only exist with extreme specialization. Hell, if we take into account that the land available couldn't even remotely support the people living on it (~2km2 per person per year), so there'd be a famine under those conditions and you'll what's being suggested as "alternative" is effectively extreme suffering followed by death for 95%+ of the population, maybe 99%+.
  - leereeves 1y ago
    Subsistence farming is orthogonal to slavery. A farmer could be free, and a slave could do specialized work. Even in the antebellum South, there were slaves doing advanced work, like James Derham who worked as a doctor. Most people on this site are beneficiaries of this economy, fortunate to have many options and resources. Not everyone is so lucky. I'd like to think it would be possible to build a specialized, prosperous economy without economic exploitation, but we certainly aren't there yet.
mystified5016 1y ago
[flagged]
- pbh101 1y ago
  And a fish doesn’t recognize water.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  If you think the cushy white collar jobs most of us HN readers have "mangle and shred your body", try non-mechanized subsistence agriculture for a few years and see how that compares.
- BSOhealth 1y ago
  I mean, I see what you're doing there. But it is more of a fallacy of language to get to accusing me of rationalizing human slavery. So that is a bit crappy. Again, "the economy" is just supply/demand. "The economy" exists with or without humans. Animals are subject to natural resources around them. A human living "freely" in the forest is subject to it. What you did in your later lines was fulfill my exact original recommendation to OP -- they are not talking about "slave to the economy", they are talking about "slave to the slave masters who manipulate our economy to a greater extent than we have resources to overcome". It's all semantics, but phrases like "slave to the economy" come off as something a 13-year-old shouts after seeing a couple pop-psych youtube vids.
- jokethrowaway 1y ago
  Go in the woods, hunt and forage your food. As long as you have no monetary income and cause no trouble, the people with guns won't persecute you. The people with guns still persecute you? Try another country with a less competent government. It's not slavery as long as you have this choice - but I don't think you'll like that existence. You are not a slave to the economy, you are a slave to violence. Other people with a capacity for violence will hurt you and claim the land where you live. And that's nature. The economy is just the soft-core version of that - with extra rules.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Oh, baloney. "Slave of the plantation" is different from "slave of the economy" because one was, you know, literal slavery. And the other isn't. > If you don't participate in the economy, you die. Not through some physical impossibility, but because the owners and masters will not allow you food, water, shelter, medicine. If they could control air they'd sell that too. It's not that they won't allow you food, as if they are consciously controlling whether you get a morsel today or not. It's that your food supply is not their responsibility. It's yours. You want food? Go do something to get it. You know who is responsible for feeding others? Slave owners. You have that control; they don't. Be glad of that, even if it means you have to go to work. > If you don't get a job and sacrifice 98% of the income generated by your work to your owner and master, you die. Not at all. You can work for yourself - start your own business. Most people won't take the risk - or take on the work - to do it. That doesn't make them a slave, though. And, 98%? Have you seen the profit margins of, say, grocery stores?
surgical_fire 1y ago
I understand GP's post in a different way - While I consider economic indicators to be very important, I think they fail to measure properly "quality of life" while ate the same time being used as surrogate for it. For example, a public park may be a great asset to the people that live around it. But it generates little to none in terms of GDP. Privatizing it and turning it into a parking lot has more economic activity, while making the lives of people meaningfully worse. That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction is what turns us into "slaves of the economy"
- anonymars 1y ago
  Feels like a cousin of the McNamara fallacy: what can't be (or simply isn't) measured may as well not exist. (Probably most people who have encountered OKRs are familiar with this). RFK (the original one, not the brainworm one): > The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
- danans 1y ago
  > That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction We do have many measurements to reconcile that. We know how much particulate air pollution from fossil fuel combustion increases health care expenditures. We know how not having save places to exercise outdoors affects general health and results in sedentary lifestyle diseases. But most of our decisions, individually and as a society, are predicated on short term convenience and gratification, not long term health, so we ignore the measures we already have.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Yeah, but the rhetorical justification for all the crap stuff is the economy. It's weird to me that we organise our lives based on one social science and ignore all the others.
thiagoharry 1y ago
> But, "the economy" is generally just a descriptor for what people need/want, and what they're willing to do for it. It’s not exactly about what people want, but rather what capital needs to grow and increase its value. Most people have no say in these decisions and are left with only two options: comply or starve.
d3ms 1y ago
This is a simplistic point of view. The economy is a particular arrangement of productive forces. Our slavish, irrational devotion to one particular arrangement is what makes us "slaves" to it. Naturally, power is expressed through whatever arrangement is decided upon, and therefore "manipulation" is guaranteed to benefit those with the power to change the system. Since the number of people who benefit the most, and therefore have the most power, is very small then it stands to reason that your information imbalance arrises from the exclusivity of this arrangement. For example: the owners of retailers, restaurants, and other such businesses decided that they will not accept prolonged lockdowns. Therefore, the entire system acquiesced to their demands. Consequently, one million people died in the United States alone. So, we are "slaves to the economy" because all of the decisions are made for the benefit of the ~2% of people who own a business. Those who were allowed to isolate, such as tech workers and such, just let this happen without anything more than a "tsk tsk", and that was because ultimately those people wanted a coffee delivered to their front door and 10% gains on their portfolio (yes, I hate my co-workers). Self interested people enabled by a comfortable, morally bankrupt middle class that tosses the working poor to the wolves for a chance to sell their carcass - that is "the economy" Now, "the economy" said recently that this middle class can go stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and forget about work from home. Guess this allegiance to "the economy" really did get us nowhere, huh?

leereeves 1y ago

When someone complains about "the economy", they aren't complaining about the abstract idea of an economy, they're complaining about a particular economy (usually the one they live in). One could literally be a "slave to this economy" in a slave-based economy, or figuratively in an economy where other people own the land (for example) and force them to work.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
spwa4 1y ago
But that makes these claims of "slavery" even more absurd. Would you have to do more or less living as a subsistence farmer? Would you have better or worse quality of life? That's an easy one: no way in hell, it'd be SO much worse. Our society can only exist with extreme specialization. Hell, if we take into account that the land available couldn't even remotely support the people living on it (~2km2 per person per year), so there'd be a famine under those conditions and you'll what's being suggested as "alternative" is effectively extreme suffering followed by death for 95%+ of the population, maybe 99%+.
- leereeves 1y ago
  Subsistence farming is orthogonal to slavery. A farmer could be free, and a slave could do specialized work. Even in the antebellum South, there were slaves doing advanced work, like James Derham who worked as a doctor. Most people on this site are beneficiaries of this economy, fortunate to have many options and resources. Not everyone is so lucky. I'd like to think it would be possible to build a specialized, prosperous economy without economic exploitation, but we certainly aren't there yet.

mystified5016 1y ago

[flagged]

pbh101 1y ago
And a fish doesn’t recognize water.
decimalenough 1y ago
If you think the cushy white collar jobs most of us HN readers have "mangle and shred your body", try non-mechanized subsistence agriculture for a few years and see how that compares.
BSOhealth 1y ago
I mean, I see what you're doing there. But it is more of a fallacy of language to get to accusing me of rationalizing human slavery. So that is a bit crappy. Again, "the economy" is just supply/demand. "The economy" exists with or without humans. Animals are subject to natural resources around them. A human living "freely" in the forest is subject to it. What you did in your later lines was fulfill my exact original recommendation to OP -- they are not talking about "slave to the economy", they are talking about "slave to the slave masters who manipulate our economy to a greater extent than we have resources to overcome". It's all semantics, but phrases like "slave to the economy" come off as something a 13-year-old shouts after seeing a couple pop-psych youtube vids.
jokethrowaway 1y ago
Go in the woods, hunt and forage your food. As long as you have no monetary income and cause no trouble, the people with guns won't persecute you. The people with guns still persecute you? Try another country with a less competent government. It's not slavery as long as you have this choice - but I don't think you'll like that existence. You are not a slave to the economy, you are a slave to violence. Other people with a capacity for violence will hurt you and claim the land where you live. And that's nature. The economy is just the soft-core version of that - with extra rules.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Oh, baloney. "Slave of the plantation" is different from "slave of the economy" because one was, you know, literal slavery. And the other isn't. > If you don't participate in the economy, you die. Not through some physical impossibility, but because the owners and masters will not allow you food, water, shelter, medicine. If they could control air they'd sell that too. It's not that they won't allow you food, as if they are consciously controlling whether you get a morsel today or not. It's that your food supply is not their responsibility. It's yours. You want food? Go do something to get it. You know who is responsible for feeding others? Slave owners. You have that control; they don't. Be glad of that, even if it means you have to go to work. > If you don't get a job and sacrifice 98% of the income generated by your work to your owner and master, you die. Not at all. You can work for yourself - start your own business. Most people won't take the risk - or take on the work - to do it. That doesn't make them a slave, though. And, 98%? Have you seen the profit margins of, say, grocery stores?

surgical_fire 1y ago

I understand GP's post in a different way - While I consider economic indicators to be very important, I think they fail to measure properly "quality of life" while ate the same time being used as surrogate for it. For example, a public park may be a great asset to the people that live around it. But it generates little to none in terms of GDP. Privatizing it and turning it into a parking lot has more economic activity, while making the lives of people meaningfully worse. That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction is what turns us into "slaves of the economy"

anonymars 1y ago
Feels like a cousin of the McNamara fallacy: what can't be (or simply isn't) measured may as well not exist. (Probably most people who have encountered OKRs are familiar with this). RFK (the original one, not the brainworm one): > The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
danans 1y ago
> That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction We do have many measurements to reconcile that. We know how much particulate air pollution from fossil fuel combustion increases health care expenditures. We know how not having save places to exercise outdoors affects general health and results in sedentary lifestyle diseases. But most of our decisions, individually and as a society, are predicated on short term convenience and gratification, not long term health, so we ignore the measures we already have.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Yeah, but the rhetorical justification for all the crap stuff is the economy. It's weird to me that we organise our lives based on one social science and ignore all the others.

thiagoharry 1y ago

> But, "the economy" is generally just a descriptor for what people need/want, and what they're willing to do for it. It’s not exactly about what people want, but rather what capital needs to grow and increase its value. Most people have no say in these decisions and are left with only two options: comply or starve.

d3ms 1y ago

This is a simplistic point of view. The economy is a particular arrangement of productive forces. Our slavish, irrational devotion to one particular arrangement is what makes us "slaves" to it. Naturally, power is expressed through whatever arrangement is decided upon, and therefore "manipulation" is guaranteed to benefit those with the power to change the system. Since the number of people who benefit the most, and therefore have the most power, is very small then it stands to reason that your information imbalance arrises from the exclusivity of this arrangement. For example: the owners of retailers, restaurants, and other such businesses decided that they will not accept prolonged lockdowns. Therefore, the entire system acquiesced to their demands. Consequently, one million people died in the United States alone. So, we are "slaves to the economy" because all of the decisions are made for the benefit of the ~2% of people who own a business. Those who were allowed to isolate, such as tech workers and such, just let this happen without anything more than a "tsk tsk", and that was because ultimately those people wanted a coffee delivered to their front door and 10% gains on their portfolio (yes, I hate my co-workers). Self interested people enabled by a comfortable, morally bankrupt middle class that tosses the working poor to the wolves for a chance to sell their carcass - that is "the economy" Now, "the economy" said recently that this middle class can go stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and forget about work from home. Guess this allegiance to "the economy" really did get us nowhere, huh?