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> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Who do you think would "allow" this? God? Th

• StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.
  • godelski 1y ago
    Funny that we have a ton of people asking what people would do in a post scarce society. Stating that man needs work. Yet, it also seems to be said most by the people who have been free from the need to labor for generations. They still do, they still desire more, yet their lives are certainly post scarce. Hell, the whole goal of retirement is to become post scarce, and have a few years where you can live without the need to labor. Seems like we already have some decent evidence to what such a world would look like.
    • CooCooCaCha 1y ago
      People will always yearn and wonder and imagine. Sure some people will spend their time fishing but a lot of people need things to strive for a and they will make things up or seek out others who feel the same way.
      • godelski 1y ago
        I agree. Lots of evidence to suggest that this would allow humans to be the most human they could be. Calling it a new Renaissance is not a stretch. Nor reminding those that much of the scientific advancements in the past were made by those who had the luxury of enough free time to sit around and think. But I think too many confuse this message with suggesting some form of Communism or Socialism. I'm not advocating for that (personally, I'm strong believer in Capitalism, even if not the Laissez-faire kind. You can't control a wild horse, but neither should you let it freely destroy your farm). Those notions are related, but not the same thing. You can clearly, as demonstrated by rich elite and people retiring, have post scarce lives without the need for such direct control.
  • wyager 1y ago
    If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person. If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      While I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem (it doesn’t - fiscal policies and social policies scarily live at the intersection of economy and politics - plus even from a pure economic point of view it is much more complicated than a simple optimisation problem and I do have an economic degree by the way), on top of you being frankly condescending while bringing little to the table which would somehow explain if not justify the attitude, you can certainly get away with far heavier inheritance taxes without actually hurting your economy in any meaningful way. You can also tax the rich a lot more heavily without hurting your economy in any meaningful way. And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
      • wyager 1y ago
        > I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem... I do have an economic degree by the way I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it > I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point. Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here. You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.
        • 1y ago
  • SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Isn't that exactly how retirement works though? Old people who produce no labour but just get everything given to them because of the capitol they built up previously.
    • Ancalagon 1y ago
      No, the parent is talking about inheritors. Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes.
      • Aeolun 1y ago
        Those mean the government always gets its cut (and pisses off the inheritors), but functionally whether you inherit 10 or 5M doesn’t really make a difference.
      • throwaway2037 1y ago
        > Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes. This is a myth. It is lower than most wealthy European nations. Details: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/japan/individual/other-taxes https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/japan/individual/other-taxes Also: https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Inheritance_tax https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Inheritance_tax
  • ahupp 1y ago
    Can you quantify what you think that choice looks like? Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true. The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
• amag 1y ago
  Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.
  • tossandthrow 1y ago
    The point is, that the society does not owe you 10 years to do whatever.
    • rightbyte 1y ago
      Which is why he argues it should?
    • amag 1y ago
      You mean I can't sue society if I die nine years into retirement?
    • Jochim 1y ago
      This is how you end up with extremists.
    • HappMacDonald 1y ago
      And why wouldn't a society owe its citizens anything after 40+ years of keeping their nose at the grindstone, and obeying all of its laws? Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another. If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.
      • RestlessMind 1y ago
        Then you just fall back to a small trusted circle of family and friends. Or, what we used to call a tribe or a clan back then.
      • 1y ago
• godelski 1y ago
  > This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself No, it is a resource allocation problem. I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime. This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group. If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed. Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups. It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble. It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem. [0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time. [1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.
  • wyager 1y ago
    > No, it is a resource allocation problem. There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way. > I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?". > This isn't a zero sum game It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production) > Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
• deleted 1y ago
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