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A telling & loaded question: Are people working so many hours because we’ve just somehow independently conceived this desire for lattes and Panini and dog-walke
by ctdonath 12y ago
A telling & loaded question: Are people working so many hours because we’ve just somehow independently conceived this desire for lattes and Panini and dog-walkers and the like, or is it that people are grabbing food and coffee on the go and hiring people to walk their dogs because they’re all working so much?
Making panini or coffee - good ones - takes effort, time, and resources to a degree few are willing to engage on their own. I've a dozen coffee makers, acquired in the quest to learn how to brew a perfect cup, and still drop $1.75 at Starbucks because a swipe of a card and a few minutes of scheduled skilled labor are often preferable to finding decent beans, grinding them, heating water, buying & fitting a filter, pouring, timing, cleaning and stowing what's needed; ditto lunch and dog-walking. Sure, we could all make fancy lunches and fine coffees and walk the dogs, and enjoy doing so at select times, but most people are unable and unwilling to at that level day-in-and-day-out when slinging dirt, paper, or bits can acquire such lifestyle.
As for the "BS jobs": in between the productive (slinging dirt, or deciding who should sling which dirt where) are "glue jobs" and "filler jobs", not notable of themselves but required to cover & hold together aspects of productivity, without which cumulatively expensive problems would arise.
That opportunities in any job may be abused for personal gain, or trail off to nothing useful, is simply a reality of human nature and imperfect systems.
The question, foundational to much of the biased rambling in the rest of the interview, is either naive or disingenuous. We have independently conceived of odd luxuries, and made them profitable for someone to do despite being arguably wasteful, or that they are in fact our chosen outlet for the long-predicted "life of leisure". Like "living on the Moon", the remote notion is romanticized, but when given the option to ... most people are disinterested in eeking out survival on a giant atmosphere-free dead rock, or idly reading or playing games whilst subsisting on mundane food & accommodations; rather, they'd instead choose a routine of imposed obligations, coupled with swipe-a-card easy access to higher luxuries of relatively fine foods and fancier surroundings.
I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity (and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods & services with the swipe of a card. Force redistribution to impose the social structure & values the interviewee wants, and methinks most of us would rebel at the results; we're not living that way for a reason.
- rayiner 12y ago> I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity (and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods & services with the swipe of a card. This line of argument ignores the obvious collective action issues in play. I think everyone could work 20% less, and make due with 20% fewer luxuries, and 90% of people would be happy with that trade-off. But any given individual can't work 20% less, because then they'd get fired, and their kids would go to shitty schools in places with lots of crime and not be able to afford medical treatment if they got sick. So everyone works more than they want to, and most of that extra production goes to shareholders. I'm not a "life of leisure" kind of guy. I'm a workaholic without many hobbies and not a lot of patience for relaxation. But I'm almost positive that people like me are in the distinct minority, and can't help but feel that it's us forcing our values on everyone else.
- goldfeld 12y agoExactly. What the grand parent commenter doesn't understand is that even though he wants to work his ass off to emulate a lifestyle of the aristocracy (who don't have to work their asses off as much because they're rent-seekers and capital holders), because he bought into that culturally and he has the opportunity to acquire such a lifestyle, the majority of working class hasn't bought into that (shielded by the belief that they can't get there anyway because they don't have the opportunity) and would happily accept working less in exchange for staying in the same situation, i.e. no need for luxuries and the conveniences of consumerism--but that doesn't seem fair, right? If they work less, they should lose something! Except they're already far screwed over because they make indecently less than they're worth to sustain the rich's privileges, and well it's always been like that. The societies we end up with are not the "cumulation of free choices", they're cumulative politics and power struggles. I read somewhere recently that being a leftist or a right-winger is in part wired up on your brain. I tend to believe that, one side just doesn't seem to understand what motivates the other to think as they do.