8 ms·

Why do we assume everyone should be working?

67 points by Wilsoniumite 2mo ago

seu 2mo ago
Before that, a more important question is: why assume that buying or having "more stuff" leads to a better life?
- Wilsoniumite 2mo ago
  Also true but that's not something I can easily show with economics.
- wvenable 2mo ago
  Human life requires some consumables. Even with less stuff, you will always need some stuff.
  - copperx 2mo ago
    We need very few non perishables aside from the roof on your head.
    - wvenable 2mo ago
      Even a roof on your head is perishable over time.
  - fittingopposite 2mo ago
    That 'some' is actually very little compared to rich countries' GDP per capita. You could argue that a lot is wasted acquiring useless stuff.
- socalgal2 2mo ago
  Do we assume that?
throw__away7391 2mo ago
Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.
- hamper653 2mo ago
  So by "working", the author really means "working for a wage"?
- simianwords 2mo ago
  its not so obvious that the stupid person won't provide positive returns at the margins. i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
- maiti_ma 2mo ago
  I wish a different adjective was used other than 'stupid', because it can distract from the point of the article (I wanted to come up with an acronym - best attempt: Someone Too Unsuitably Positioned In D workforce, and finally asked chat gpt: Someone Tragically Unqualified, Poorly Integrated & Deployed). Anyhow, I don't take it as an insult to anyone, but simply people's circumstances (limited opportunities, lack of education..) can make it difficult for them to positively contribute to the system.
bradfitz 2mo ago
> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
- Wilsoniumite 2mo ago
  <3 you know what, I'm keeping it now.
- lucumo 2mo ago
  That won't be a good heuristic much longer. A few weeks back I saw Gemini write "Redundant Abstraciton Overhead" (-citon instead of -ction). It was the first time I saw a model make a "typo", so I made a note of it.
  - copperx 2mo ago
    I've seen Opus 5 make typos this week, which is something I haven't seen since early GPT days. I have no idea why.
  - xigoi 2mo ago
    In non-English languages, LLMs seem to make typos way more often than humans.
    - lucumo 2mo ago
      Which ones? I haven't seen them in Dutch, so I wonder what the languages that do have typos have in common.
      - xigoi 2mo ago
        When my girlfriend was conversing with an LLM in Czech, it often made grammatical mistakes or even switched into a different Slavic language (including ones that use the Cyrillic alphabet!).
- 2mo ago
jimkleiber 2mo ago
I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride." So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job. But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do. And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways. So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
yetihehe 2mo ago
Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?". > ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
- SchemaLoad 2mo ago
  The dream society would be where we all just work less hours. Everyone can get a job but doesn't have to burn every workable hour of their life.
  - yoz-y 2mo ago
    This, for some reason makes too much sense. So much so that I’m curious if there is some sort of world wide conspiracy to not do this. If more people were employed during less time, we would also need more administration. Not to mention that there are at least two sectors where there can never be enough employees: medicine and education.
    - SchemaLoad 2mo ago
      I think the simplest answer that probably accounts for most of it is just that employees all have overhead, 20 people working full time is more efficient than 40 people working half time. Less HR work, less moving context between people, less office space, less laptops, etc. So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
      - yetihehe 2mo ago
anon48293 2mo ago
It might be a net loss to the economy, true. But to me it’s about you trying to contribute. I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day. But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money. Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.
- ElProlactin 2mo ago
  > I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day. Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American. In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
  - anon48293 2mo ago
    I’m not. I’m from a welfare state EU country and worked with these people for years. Some really can’t work; a lot of them can but just don’t want to, and cost the taxpayers thousands per month for smoking weed all day.
- dingdongditchme 2mo ago
  I'm happy to give some lazy dude smoking weed all day my tax money. 1. Working gives me satisfaction and money. 2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money. 3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
- plastic3169 2mo ago
  There is also the category of people who have enough capital to not to work. This group of people have detached their activity from their income. They can be very active or lazy and it does not make a big difference. You are working to pay their dividends.
greyface- 2mo ago
> The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. - Arthur C. Clarke
sublinear 2mo ago
How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals? Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
- AussieWog93 2mo ago
  Godwin's new law!
- darkwater 2mo ago
  I read it completely differently, and I was expecting a mention to UBI any line soon.
- peder 2mo ago
  That’s not a right-wing thought BTW. Publoc schools in Germany for instance are highly exclusionary.
dostick 2mo ago
UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.
- contingencies 2mo ago
  Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families. We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.
  - ileonichwiesz 2mo ago
    Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?
    - contingencies 2mo ago
      It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems. Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.
ElProlactin 2mo ago
> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff” This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto. In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.". Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff. > Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being. Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  > Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem Imagine there’s a ratio of that category of people that’s a more optimal ratio than zero.
  - ElProlactin 2mo ago
    The big question though is: can you have a society in which one group works and another doesn't? Ostensibly, the working group would be the ones who create and/or own all the value that supports the ones who don't. At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides. And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.
delusional 2mo ago
This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.
- sscaryterry 2mo ago
  Indeed, the rhetoric is uncanny.
firasd 2mo ago
In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs
- sublinear 2mo ago
  What makes you think that those emails are trivial amounts of work?
skybrian 2mo ago
We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled. There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
- pickleglitch 2mo ago
  >Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled. There are plenty of people who do not accept this. We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them. The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
  - dingdongditchme 2mo ago
    Woa. I'm with you all the way but let's agree that the people who think the disabled should be exterminated is a minority many of whom died at then end of world war II? Even if I tolerated someone else exterminating people, hell even if I helped in some way I would still know that it is not morally defensible. Of course with 8B people you will find some willing to exterminate the disabled but not "lots" by any stretch.
    - pickleglitch 2mo ago
      I'm sure it is a small minority who think that way. It's impossible to tell for sure, but my gut tells me the number is still larger than we might want to believe.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
andreapaiola 2mo ago
Clearly he is not a socialist LOL I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...
- Erem 2mo ago
  > I disagree...because art and poetry and philosophy exist Can you expand your point? I don't see how their existence leads to disagreeing with the author, and in fact I see the opposite.
  - andreapaiola 2mo ago
    Seems obvious: arts and philosophy are not of immediate value. They need "free" patronage.
- simianwords 2mo ago
  it would be naive to assume that you would be paid to be an artist or poet in a socialism as opposed to a farmer
  - hamper653 2mo ago
    In socialism, you wouldn’t be paid. That’s the whole point.
    - cykros 2mo ago
      Yea, we saw the bread lines.
      - hamper653 2mo ago
        So did we.
somenameforme 2mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%. And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force. Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
> does economics support that statement always? Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her. Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources. We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they? To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant. "I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream. Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
- simianwords 2mo ago
  > To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant. sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
  - matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    > the socialists Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning. Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state. Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator. Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home. > neo-luddities Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject. > the ones that are for automation are the billionaires Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.
andreapaiola 2mo ago
Then why Star Wars is considered a dystopia and Star Trek is considered an Utopia?
reedf1 2mo ago
Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.
Hipst3r 2mo ago
Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority. So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often. Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
mbmbn 2mo ago
The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them. If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
pmcarlton 2mo ago
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.
- lucumo 2mo ago
  > "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, Taxes themselves are the hurt. You're ignoring that the taxes are collected from that person and that they could be spend on something that person would want more. We need taxes, don't get me wrong, but it's entirely reasonable for people to have an opinion on what's done with the money they worked for.
cantalopes 2mo ago
Is this a guerilla ad by anthropic ceo?
locallost 2mo ago
As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone. As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
simianwords 2mo ago
Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.
ralfd 2mo ago
What sloppy slop is that? > Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop. This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense. > When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean? > That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder? Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff. > Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists, There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour. It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.
yorwba 2mo ago
> A politician should not need to hunt for job creating policies, and yet they do because admittedly the alternative is poverty. This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.
ozim 2mo ago
Feels like related to [0]. Looks shallowly philosophical, based on "me and my friend". Equating "economy" to some small subset of white collar work. Have to say world is much bigger place and there are other jobs than filling in tables in Excel spreadsheet. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232221
cuoder 2mo ago
The definition of 'work' itself is pretty arbitrary. Someone writing for fun could end up being 'work' if it inspires some large change in the world. And someone doing lots of labor could barely move the needle. In that sense, not everyone (who is eligible to work or looks like they are working) is working in the first place.
burnt-resistor 2mo ago
Crab bucket mentality demands pointless hazing rituals and distribution of sufficient suffering.
znpy 2mo ago
Because otherwise the question becomes: who decides who should be working and who should not? Why you should not be working and i should?
cykros 2mo ago
Not everyone needs to work. Some people have enough in savings to cover their expenses. Other people have benefactors (most notably, parents). And others live off of property that was stolen by violent gangs (aka taxes) and provided to them as a method to ensure that those gang members get to keep their position through the voting process.

67 points by Wilsoniumite 2mo ago

seu 2mo ago

Before that, a more important question is: why assume that buying or having "more stuff" leads to a better life?

Wilsoniumite 2mo ago
Also true but that's not something I can easily show with economics.
wvenable 2mo ago
Human life requires some consumables. Even with less stuff, you will always need some stuff.
- copperx 2mo ago
  We need very few non perishables aside from the roof on your head.
  - wvenable 2mo ago
    Even a roof on your head is perishable over time.
- fittingopposite 2mo ago
  That 'some' is actually very little compared to rich countries' GDP per capita. You could argue that a lot is wasted acquiring useless stuff.
socalgal2 2mo ago
Do we assume that?

throw__away7391 2mo ago

Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.

hamper653 2mo ago
So by "working", the author really means "working for a wage"?
simianwords 2mo ago
its not so obvious that the stupid person won't provide positive returns at the margins. i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
maiti_ma 2mo ago
I wish a different adjective was used other than 'stupid', because it can distract from the point of the article (I wanted to come up with an acronym - best attempt: Someone Too Unsuitably Positioned In D workforce, and finally asked chat gpt: Someone Tragically Unqualified, Poorly Integrated & Deployed). Anyhow, I don't take it as an insult to anyone, but simply people's circumstances (limited opportunities, lack of education..) can make it difficult for them to positively contribute to the system.

bradfitz 2mo ago

> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.

Wilsoniumite 2mo ago
<3 you know what, I'm keeping it now.
lucumo 2mo ago
That won't be a good heuristic much longer. A few weeks back I saw Gemini write "Redundant Abstraciton Overhead" (-citon instead of -ction). It was the first time I saw a model make a "typo", so I made a note of it.
- copperx 2mo ago
  I've seen Opus 5 make typos this week, which is something I haven't seen since early GPT days. I have no idea why.
- xigoi 2mo ago
  In non-English languages, LLMs seem to make typos way more often than humans.
  - lucumo 2mo ago
    Which ones? I haven't seen them in Dutch, so I wonder what the languages that do have typos have in common.
    - xigoi 2mo ago
      When my girlfriend was conversing with an LLM in Czech, it often made grammatical mistakes or even switched into a different Slavic language (including ones that use the Cyrillic alphabet!).
2mo ago

jimkleiber 2mo ago

I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride." So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job. But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do. And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways. So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.

yetihehe 2mo ago

Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?". > ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.

SchemaLoad 2mo ago
The dream society would be where we all just work less hours. Everyone can get a job but doesn't have to burn every workable hour of their life.
- yoz-y 2mo ago
  This, for some reason makes too much sense. So much so that I’m curious if there is some sort of world wide conspiracy to not do this. If more people were employed during less time, we would also need more administration. Not to mention that there are at least two sectors where there can never be enough employees: medicine and education.
  - SchemaLoad 2mo ago
    I think the simplest answer that probably accounts for most of it is just that employees all have overhead, 20 people working full time is more efficient than 40 people working half time. Less HR work, less moving context between people, less office space, less laptops, etc. So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
    - yetihehe 2mo ago

anon48293 2mo ago

It might be a net loss to the economy, true. But to me it’s about you trying to contribute. I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day. But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money. Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.

ElProlactin 2mo ago
> I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day. Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American. In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
- anon48293 2mo ago
  I’m not. I’m from a welfare state EU country and worked with these people for years. Some really can’t work; a lot of them can but just don’t want to, and cost the taxpayers thousands per month for smoking weed all day.
dingdongditchme 2mo ago
I'm happy to give some lazy dude smoking weed all day my tax money. 1. Working gives me satisfaction and money. 2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money. 3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
plastic3169 2mo ago
There is also the category of people who have enough capital to not to work. This group of people have detached their activity from their income. They can be very active or lazy and it does not make a big difference. You are working to pay their dividends.

greyface- 2mo ago

> The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. - Arthur C. Clarke

sublinear 2mo ago

How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals? Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?

AussieWog93 2mo ago
Godwin's new law!
darkwater 2mo ago
I read it completely differently, and I was expecting a mention to UBI any line soon.
peder 2mo ago
That’s not a right-wing thought BTW. Publoc schools in Germany for instance are highly exclusionary.

dostick 2mo ago

UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.

contingencies 2mo ago
Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families. We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.
- ileonichwiesz 2mo ago
  Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?
  - contingencies 2mo ago
    It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems. Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.

ElProlactin 2mo ago

> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff” This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto. In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.". Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff. > Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being. Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.

andsoitis 2mo ago
> Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem Imagine there’s a ratio of that category of people that’s a more optimal ratio than zero.
- ElProlactin 2mo ago
  The big question though is: can you have a society in which one group works and another doesn't? Ostensibly, the working group would be the ones who create and/or own all the value that supports the ones who don't. At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides. And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.

delusional 2mo ago

This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.

sscaryterry 2mo ago
Indeed, the rhetoric is uncanny.

firasd 2mo ago

In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs

sublinear 2mo ago
What makes you think that those emails are trivial amounts of work?

skybrian 2mo ago

We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled. There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.

pickleglitch 2mo ago
>Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled. There are plenty of people who do not accept this. We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them. The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
- dingdongditchme 2mo ago
  Woa. I'm with you all the way but let's agree that the people who think the disabled should be exterminated is a minority many of whom died at then end of world war II? Even if I tolerated someone else exterminating people, hell even if I helped in some way I would still know that it is not morally defensible. Of course with 8B people you will find some willing to exterminate the disabled but not "lots" by any stretch.
  - pickleglitch 2mo ago
    I'm sure it is a small minority who think that way. It's impossible to tell for sure, but my gut tells me the number is still larger than we might want to believe.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

andreapaiola 2mo ago

Clearly he is not a socialist LOL I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...

Erem 2mo ago
> I disagree...because art and poetry and philosophy exist Can you expand your point? I don't see how their existence leads to disagreeing with the author, and in fact I see the opposite.
- andreapaiola 2mo ago
  Seems obvious: arts and philosophy are not of immediate value. They need "free" patronage.
simianwords 2mo ago
it would be naive to assume that you would be paid to be an artist or poet in a socialism as opposed to a farmer
- hamper653 2mo ago
  In socialism, you wouldn’t be paid. That’s the whole point.
  - cykros 2mo ago
    Yea, we saw the bread lines.
    - hamper653 2mo ago
      So did we.

somenameforme 2mo ago

I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%. And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force. Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

> does economics support that statement always? Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her. Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources. We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they? To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant. "I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream. Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.

simianwords 2mo ago
> To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant. sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  > the socialists Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning. Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state. Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator. Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home. > neo-luddities Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject. > the ones that are for automation are the billionaires Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.

andreapaiola 2mo ago

Then why Star Wars is considered a dystopia and Star Trek is considered an Utopia?

reedf1 2mo ago

Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.

Hipst3r 2mo ago

Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority. So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often. Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol

mbmbn 2mo ago

The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them. If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.

pmcarlton 2mo ago

I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.

lucumo 2mo ago
> "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, Taxes themselves are the hurt. You're ignoring that the taxes are collected from that person and that they could be spend on something that person would want more. We need taxes, don't get me wrong, but it's entirely reasonable for people to have an opinion on what's done with the money they worked for.

cantalopes 2mo ago

Is this a guerilla ad by anthropic ceo?

locallost 2mo ago

As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone. As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.

simianwords 2mo ago

Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.

ralfd 2mo ago

What sloppy slop is that? > Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop. This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense. > When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean? > That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder? Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff. > Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists, There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour. It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.

yorwba 2mo ago

> A politician should not need to hunt for job creating policies, and yet they do because admittedly the alternative is poverty. This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.

ozim 2mo ago

Feels like related to [0]. Looks shallowly philosophical, based on "me and my friend". Equating "economy" to some small subset of white collar work. Have to say world is much bigger place and there are other jobs than filling in tables in Excel spreadsheet. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232221

cuoder 2mo ago

The definition of 'work' itself is pretty arbitrary. Someone writing for fun could end up being 'work' if it inspires some large change in the world. And someone doing lots of labor could barely move the needle. In that sense, not everyone (who is eligible to work or looks like they are working) is working in the first place.

burnt-resistor 2mo ago

Crab bucket mentality demands pointless hazing rituals and distribution of sufficient suffering.

znpy 2mo ago

Because otherwise the question becomes: who decides who should be working and who should not? Why you should not be working and i should?

cykros 2mo ago

Not everyone needs to work. Some people have enough in savings to cover their expenses. Other people have benefactors (most notably, parents). And others live off of property that was stolen by violent gangs (aka taxes) and provided to them as a method to ensure that those gang members get to keep their position through the voting process.