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It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when yo
by maerF0x0 7mo ago
It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoWhy would the retirees want to be put back to work? Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once? Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task? Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed? There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
- ryandrake 7mo agoMoney, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoAgain, we're talking about retirees, homemakers, college students, disabled, etc. here.
- throwaway173738 7mo agoWhy not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory? Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
- nradov 7mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 7mo agoHuh. You used to be concerned with declining birth rates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735888
- Hikikomori 7mo agoNot if it costs something.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoIMO, basic income for parents is absolutely a policy that Japan should enact. And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement. If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term. It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
- daedrdev 7mo agoThere is no guarantee people with no wants will have kids, in fact I expect the opposite
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoThose people can work for their income then; the policy I was discussing only relates to the government paying parents an income, ideally on a per-child basis (up to some maximum, maybe four; you need to have some people having bigger families to balance out the ones who don't have any children at all, but you also don't want people farming kids for money).
- fluoridation 7mo agoYou didn't answer the question, you answered a different question: "why would someone want to work, just in general?" The question that was posed was, why would someone who has already chosen to retire, or who is already fully occupied, or who is sick, want to work?
- Lerc 7mo agoHumans are older than money, so evidently we don't need it to survive, but there is more to existence than mere survival. I agree that people's basic needs to be taken care of, but I think that is an issue that needs to happen because of automation. It needs to happen because it is simply the right thing to do. I would go as fas as saying It shouldn't just be basic needs. Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone. I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
- andsoitis 7mo ago> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone. I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly. Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
- Lerc 7mo ago>Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources. That is not how the hierarchy of needs works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs Removing the cap on growth is pretty much baked in.
- samus 7mo agoMoney is a tool (maybe not the best) to make an economy with division of labor work. It's not required and probably also doesn't work in societies where everybody knows everybody else and can make sure that the right things are done and nobody slacks off.
- epolanski 7mo agoJapan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%. Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't. As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
- senordevnyc 7mo agoBut this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoYep. In a society with an aging population and a low birth rate, people who would prefer to be full-time parents staying home and raising their kids ought to instead be doing undesirable, monotonous, easily-automatable jobs that robots can do. Or at least two families could agree to pay each other to raise the other's children, so that it counts as employment, rather than raising their own. Yes, maximizing labor force participation... That's how things ought to be.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 7mo agoThat's how you ensure the birth rate stays low.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo agoI think you are missing the sarcasm.
- pj_mukh 7mo agoI don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job. If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
- singpolyma3 7mo agoIndeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
- maerF0x0 7mo agoI agree with aspects of what you mean. But there are exceptions on both sides. Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd. But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
- hamasho 7mo agoI think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.