10 ms·

I have attempted to portray similar ideas, in regards to a universal wage, to friends and family. Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not workin

by fenaer 12y ago

I have attempted to portray similar ideas, in regards to a universal wage, to friends and family. Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not working" and they refuse to move past that. They see people who work less, or don't work as a detriment to society. What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as a virtue?

michaelchisari 12y ago
Maybe there are a portion of people who are allergic to productivity. Not just work, but doing anything of import or use. No matter what social pressures there might be, they will always shirk responsibility, do the bare minimum or even less, and never have greater ambitions. The type of people who will always wait to take the garbage out until someone stands over them and doesn't leave until they've done it. I don't agree that these people are very many. I think they're extraordinarily rare, but it makes us feel better about ourselves if we think that they are common, and we have managed to rise above the common. But regardless, if they don't want to be doing anything worthwhile, and they're willing to accept the many social and economic consequences of that (no fun vacations, very hard time finding a partner, no gadgets or new cool stuff, no fancy dinners out), then I'd rather not force them to work side by side with people who want to be there. Give them a universal income, so they can rent a roof over their head, buy somes clothes and food, and then leave them be.
- drcomputer 12y ago
  I don't think people are static objects. Even if you've come into contact with one of these "types" of people, chances are that they are living on a meager amount of energy. When people are energy drained, they are either in poor health mentally, emotionally, socially, or physically. They might have expended an extraordinary amount of energy into something with no compensation. They might have broken their bodies, minds, and hearts over the kind of work they do. The human evaluation of what constitutes as value added to society is not perfect. The human evaluation of what to do is not perfect. Sometimes people just don't know what to do. Also, social pressure shouldn't be the motivator. That's motivation that comes from fear. It is literally like living solely for the sake of dying, and all I can do is feel a tremendous amount of pain for people if they experience such a thing.
- SomeThings 12y ago
  (no fun vacations, very hard time finding a partner, no gadgets or new cool stuff, no fancy dinners out). Those are trivialities in my subjective opinion.
  - snlacks 12y ago
    I took it as examples. Ways one might enjoy the fruits of their labor in the context of modern western society. Your reply made me realize another way to think of it though. If all these things we spend money on are trivial, then that supports the notion. Money is a poor measure of one's productivity.
  - alexbecker 12y ago
    Having a very hard time finding a partner is a triviality in your opinion? If so, I suspect that puts you in a very small minority.
    - stegosaurus 12y ago
      That one kind of sticks out as being rather disconnected from the rest. I think his point is that most people don't work for fancy holidays or trinkets or whatever. Most people work to put a roof over their head and eat. Everything else is secondary - both trivial in terms of desire (it's less important), and trivial in terms of cost (a new 24" LCD might cost 3 days rent in some areas)
      - adrianN 12y ago
        I don't think that is really true. If all people were working for was a roof over their head and food, they could get by on very little. Most people work because they want to live in an expensive neighborhood and like to have new cars, new clothes, new electronics. Otherwise they would move somewhere where house is extremely cheap and where they don't have to commute every day. I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Germany you can have an apartment in a medium sized city and food for 500 Euro a month. You don't have to work for 40 hours a week to make that much.
stegosaurus 12y ago
I think 'hard work as a virtue' is a misguided way of thinking about it. It's about the judgement call of deciding that a person should suffer as a result of their actions (or personality, if outside their control). I think that working hard is a virtue. I think that doing whatever you do, a lot, and well, makes you a better person. Regardless of what that is. What that doesn't mean is that I think those incapable or unwilling to do so should either starve and die, or work in terrible conditions. They are human beings, they deserve better, and we can provide that without great sacrifice.
Jayschwa 12y ago
> Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not working" and they refuse to move past that. Ask them how they feel about retirement. I think you'll find that most people aren't against all forms of idleness, just ones they perceive as involuntarily financed by others.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  > Ask them how they feel about retirement. I And then ask them how their retirement will be financed. In the case of most people, a large (but shrinking over time) portion of their retirement will be funded by their fellow citizens, who pay for their retirement involuntarily.
kamaal 12y ago
>>What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as a virtue? It goes beyond that. Work is defined as some thing you do to get other stuff in return. Once that is defined, we are always going to have people who want more things than others. So you will always have people do more work. Even at a basic income you will always have people complain that they are unable to afford things rich people can. And that will be the new definition of inequality.
jdmoreira 12y ago
I always pitch universal wage and refusal of work to most people with whom I have meaningful conversations. By their reaction I'm certain that these ideas will be unpopular for the rest of our lifetime. The best you can do is to keep preaching them if you believe in them. If the other person is a thinker, most people don't want to be thinkers, you might try to pitch them post-scarcity economics or explain that historically people never worked as much as they do nowadays. Also explain that most human progress came from 'play time' not 'work time'. You won't change the world, just accept that, the world does not want to be changed. Most people invest a lot of effort in complying with the status quo. It takes generations to change this kind of social conventions. Also, "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  My wife and I travel a great deal and have had the chance to spend at least a little time in relatively undeveloped areas where people still fish, farm and so on to provide some or all of their regular diet. Note that it being a primarily agrarian situation is important. The situation is very different for poor people working in factories for example. >or explain that historically people never worked as much as they do nowadays One striking thing is how much free time people in these areas have. Particularly in the afternoon its really common to see lots of people (children, adults and old people) simply hanging out. Typically they have very limited capacity to store food so once you have enough fish for the next day or two, for example, there is very little value in catching any more. Although there are periods of very hard work (planting crops and harvesting crops in particular) there are plenty of occasions when the day's work is done relatively quickly. Your home is adequate against the weather, firewood is adequately stockpiled and your family's food supply is secure for the near to medium term so there is little value in performing additional work.
jjoonathan 12y ago
There's actually a very good argument in favor of BI that is compatible with (and even supported by) the "hard work as a virtue" philosophy. Supply and Demand. Making food/shelter/etc contingent upon working forces everybody to work, fixing the supply of labor. The relative demand for labor decreases over time due to automation. If we stay the course, capitalism will desperately try to fix the supply/demand imbalance by penalizing all workers, hardworking and lazy alike, for supplying a service not in demand. Wages will decrease until the supply of labor is reduced by any means necessary (i.e. some will leave the workforce and resort to resort to begging, bumming off of neighbors, crime). Rather than artificially fixing the supply of labor at an arbitrary level and penalizing people for their honest work until some give up, it's better to "buy out" the laziest among us. Sure they won't be contributing to society, but at least they won't prevent others from receiving fair compensation which is exactly what happens in the otherwise inevitable race to the bottom.
- NobleLie 12y ago
  > Rather than artificially fixing the supply of labor at an arbitrary level and penalizing people for their honest work until some give up, it's better to "buy out" the laziest among us. Sure they won't be contributing to society, but at least they won't prevent others from receiving fair compensation which is exactly what happens in the otherwise inevitable race to the bottom. I feel like you are missing the point that the "bottom" (lazy? I would most likely disagree...lazy + unfortunate genes / birth status / location perhaps) has a much better, easier, fairer chance (in obvious unison with a reduction of unemployment,) given organizations reduce the time worked per day, thus opening up opportunities for currently employed (more leisure time) and the unemployed (the jobless) That's not to say this model has severe flaws. It's more utopian than what are we faced in capitalist societies now, but goes against business profit maximization, which I'll simplify in a useful manner: organizations like to hire as few people as possible and use as much of their leisure time as possible in order to reduce benefits expected by most workers increasingly expensive benefits that they've come to expect in long term cushy jobs. The recent uptick in free lance jobs is rough for this very reason. It's less risky to sell most your leisure time to large companies. That's my personal diagnosis. As for my solution...the the non risk averse must continue(create) their own entrepreneurship endeavors and as the older generation dies out, destroy the [8-9]-[5-6] scourge imbued unto us by unionized industrialists of the past and craft new culture. Keep companies running smoothly with more employees working less time. Any opinions/counterpoints would be appreciated. I'd perhaps be considered an idealist with high expectations of the future. P.S Long time lurking/reading here on HN and finally beginning to post. Always appreciate the comment threads more than any other web site.
neverwrong 12y ago
if a person doesn't work and isn't ok with dying from starvation, then he necessarily becomes dependent on other people. i think it's pretty reasonable to expect people to work for their necessities. "hard work" is another matter.
- ekr 12y ago
  At this point in time, the technology required for autonomously producing food has already been available for some time. At the moment, there are still a significant portion of the population employed in architecture, but by applying the technology developed for self-driving cars for e.g., that number can be reduced signficantly.
leoh 12y ago
Remind them that they don't know how to program and probably won't have a job in ten years.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Lots of programmers won't have jobs in ten years. What, you think Amazon are going to stop when they've put all the sysadmins out of work?
  - DennisP 12y ago
    Programmers have been writing code that automates their own work ever since the first assembler.
jchrisa 12y ago
This won't convince your friends but it might help people who already get it go deeper: http://vimeo.com/25367464 http://vimeo.com/25367464 (Bifo Berardi) Also his manifesto: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm

by fenaer 12y ago

michaelchisari 12y ago

Maybe there are a portion of people who are allergic to productivity. Not just work, but doing anything of import or use. No matter what social pressures there might be, they will always shirk responsibility, do the bare minimum or even less, and never have greater ambitions. The type of people who will always wait to take the garbage out until someone stands over them and doesn't leave until they've done it. I don't agree that these people are very many. I think they're extraordinarily rare, but it makes us feel better about ourselves if we think that they are common, and we have managed to rise above the common. But regardless, if they don't want to be doing anything worthwhile, and they're willing to accept the many social and economic consequences of that (no fun vacations, very hard time finding a partner, no gadgets or new cool stuff, no fancy dinners out), then I'd rather not force them to work side by side with people who want to be there. Give them a universal income, so they can rent a roof over their head, buy somes clothes and food, and then leave them be.

drcomputer 12y ago
I don't think people are static objects. Even if you've come into contact with one of these "types" of people, chances are that they are living on a meager amount of energy. When people are energy drained, they are either in poor health mentally, emotionally, socially, or physically. They might have expended an extraordinary amount of energy into something with no compensation. They might have broken their bodies, minds, and hearts over the kind of work they do. The human evaluation of what constitutes as value added to society is not perfect. The human evaluation of what to do is not perfect. Sometimes people just don't know what to do. Also, social pressure shouldn't be the motivator. That's motivation that comes from fear. It is literally like living solely for the sake of dying, and all I can do is feel a tremendous amount of pain for people if they experience such a thing.
SomeThings 12y ago
(no fun vacations, very hard time finding a partner, no gadgets or new cool stuff, no fancy dinners out). Those are trivialities in my subjective opinion.
- snlacks 12y ago
  I took it as examples. Ways one might enjoy the fruits of their labor in the context of modern western society. Your reply made me realize another way to think of it though. If all these things we spend money on are trivial, then that supports the notion. Money is a poor measure of one's productivity.
- alexbecker 12y ago
  Having a very hard time finding a partner is a triviality in your opinion? If so, I suspect that puts you in a very small minority.
  - stegosaurus 12y ago
    That one kind of sticks out as being rather disconnected from the rest. I think his point is that most people don't work for fancy holidays or trinkets or whatever. Most people work to put a roof over their head and eat. Everything else is secondary - both trivial in terms of desire (it's less important), and trivial in terms of cost (a new 24" LCD might cost 3 days rent in some areas)
    - adrianN 12y ago
      I don't think that is really true. If all people were working for was a roof over their head and food, they could get by on very little. Most people work because they want to live in an expensive neighborhood and like to have new cars, new clothes, new electronics. Otherwise they would move somewhere where house is extremely cheap and where they don't have to commute every day. I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Germany you can have an apartment in a medium sized city and food for 500 Euro a month. You don't have to work for 40 hours a week to make that much.

stegosaurus 12y ago

I think 'hard work as a virtue' is a misguided way of thinking about it. It's about the judgement call of deciding that a person should suffer as a result of their actions (or personality, if outside their control). I think that working hard is a virtue. I think that doing whatever you do, a lot, and well, makes you a better person. Regardless of what that is. What that doesn't mean is that I think those incapable or unwilling to do so should either starve and die, or work in terrible conditions. They are human beings, they deserve better, and we can provide that without great sacrifice.

Jayschwa 12y ago

> Each time I'm met with "What stops some people from not working" and they refuse to move past that. Ask them how they feel about retirement. I think you'll find that most people aren't against all forms of idleness, just ones they perceive as involuntarily financed by others.

jnbiche 12y ago
> Ask them how they feel about retirement. I And then ask them how their retirement will be financed. In the case of most people, a large (but shrinking over time) portion of their retirement will be funded by their fellow citizens, who pay for their retirement involuntarily.

kamaal 12y ago

>>What sort of changes can be made to change people's viewpoint on hard work as a virtue? It goes beyond that. Work is defined as some thing you do to get other stuff in return. Once that is defined, we are always going to have people who want more things than others. So you will always have people do more work. Even at a basic income you will always have people complain that they are unable to afford things rich people can. And that will be the new definition of inequality.

jdmoreira 12y ago

I always pitch universal wage and refusal of work to most people with whom I have meaningful conversations. By their reaction I'm certain that these ideas will be unpopular for the rest of our lifetime. The best you can do is to keep preaching them if you believe in them. If the other person is a thinker, most people don't want to be thinkers, you might try to pitch them post-scarcity economics or explain that historically people never worked as much as they do nowadays. Also explain that most human progress came from 'play time' not 'work time'. You won't change the world, just accept that, the world does not want to be changed. Most people invest a lot of effort in complying with the status quo. It takes generations to change this kind of social conventions. Also, "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell

andyjdavis 12y ago
My wife and I travel a great deal and have had the chance to spend at least a little time in relatively undeveloped areas where people still fish, farm and so on to provide some or all of their regular diet. Note that it being a primarily agrarian situation is important. The situation is very different for poor people working in factories for example. >or explain that historically people never worked as much as they do nowadays One striking thing is how much free time people in these areas have. Particularly in the afternoon its really common to see lots of people (children, adults and old people) simply hanging out. Typically they have very limited capacity to store food so once you have enough fish for the next day or two, for example, there is very little value in catching any more. Although there are periods of very hard work (planting crops and harvesting crops in particular) there are plenty of occasions when the day's work is done relatively quickly. Your home is adequate against the weather, firewood is adequately stockpiled and your family's food supply is secure for the near to medium term so there is little value in performing additional work.

jjoonathan 12y ago

There's actually a very good argument in favor of BI that is compatible with (and even supported by) the "hard work as a virtue" philosophy. Supply and Demand. Making food/shelter/etc contingent upon working forces everybody to work, fixing the supply of labor. The relative demand for labor decreases over time due to automation. If we stay the course, capitalism will desperately try to fix the supply/demand imbalance by penalizing all workers, hardworking and lazy alike, for supplying a service not in demand. Wages will decrease until the supply of labor is reduced by any means necessary (i.e. some will leave the workforce and resort to resort to begging, bumming off of neighbors, crime). Rather than artificially fixing the supply of labor at an arbitrary level and penalizing people for their honest work until some give up, it's better to "buy out" the laziest among us. Sure they won't be contributing to society, but at least they won't prevent others from receiving fair compensation which is exactly what happens in the otherwise inevitable race to the bottom.

NobleLie 12y ago
> Rather than artificially fixing the supply of labor at an arbitrary level and penalizing people for their honest work until some give up, it's better to "buy out" the laziest among us. Sure they won't be contributing to society, but at least they won't prevent others from receiving fair compensation which is exactly what happens in the otherwise inevitable race to the bottom. I feel like you are missing the point that the "bottom" (lazy? I would most likely disagree...lazy + unfortunate genes / birth status / location perhaps) has a much better, easier, fairer chance (in obvious unison with a reduction of unemployment,) given organizations reduce the time worked per day, thus opening up opportunities for currently employed (more leisure time) and the unemployed (the jobless) That's not to say this model has severe flaws. It's more utopian than what are we faced in capitalist societies now, but goes against business profit maximization, which I'll simplify in a useful manner: organizations like to hire as few people as possible and use as much of their leisure time as possible in order to reduce benefits expected by most workers increasingly expensive benefits that they've come to expect in long term cushy jobs. The recent uptick in free lance jobs is rough for this very reason. It's less risky to sell most your leisure time to large companies. That's my personal diagnosis. As for my solution...the the non risk averse must continue(create) their own entrepreneurship endeavors and as the older generation dies out, destroy the [8-9]-[5-6] scourge imbued unto us by unionized industrialists of the past and craft new culture. Keep companies running smoothly with more employees working less time. Any opinions/counterpoints would be appreciated. I'd perhaps be considered an idealist with high expectations of the future. P.S Long time lurking/reading here on HN and finally beginning to post. Always appreciate the comment threads more than any other web site.

neverwrong 12y ago

if a person doesn't work and isn't ok with dying from starvation, then he necessarily becomes dependent on other people. i think it's pretty reasonable to expect people to work for their necessities. "hard work" is another matter.

ekr 12y ago
At this point in time, the technology required for autonomously producing food has already been available for some time. At the moment, there are still a significant portion of the population employed in architecture, but by applying the technology developed for self-driving cars for e.g., that number can be reduced signficantly.

leoh 12y ago

Remind them that they don't know how to program and probably won't have a job in ten years.

rodgerd 12y ago
Lots of programmers won't have jobs in ten years. What, you think Amazon are going to stop when they've put all the sysadmins out of work?
- DennisP 12y ago
  Programmers have been writing code that automates their own work ever since the first assembler.

jchrisa 12y ago

This won't convince your friends but it might help people who already get it go deeper: http://vimeo.com/25367464 http://vimeo.com/25367464 (Bifo Berardi) Also his manifesto: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm