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We tried this idea, in America, at the Jamestown Colony. They initially established it in a "socialist" vein wherein everyone received an equal share of the pro

We tried this idea, in America, at the Jamestown Colony. They initially established it in a "socialist" vein wherein everyone received an equal share of the proceeds (food, etc) regardless of their contributions to the colony. The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work and produce because there was no advantage to them working more than their peers. Why should I work to produce an excess when Billy Bob sits on the dock all day and receives the same share I do. When they lifted the socialist mandate on redistribution, production at the colony skyrocketed because people were rewarded for their effort. Everyone has to put a roof over their head and food in their belly. If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work (why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day?) and engage in production activities. Supporting a society necessitates producers create more than what they need, but if you create a system that takes what it deems the excess from the producers without compensation or reward and doles it out, the producers will stop producing and we'll back at Jamestown all over again.

Anderkent 11y ago
>why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day? There's a lot of room for manouver between 'everyone gets exactly the same amount no matter their contribution' and 'everyone must be productive (net-positive on the society) to sustain themselves'. So, reasons you might contribute when even the sky-gazers can survive at a decent level: 1. Because the extra pay lets you do more fun things 2. Because you enjoy the work 3. Because the extra status you get from your work contributions is rewarding 4. Because you like the people you work with 5. Because you're one of the one in ten thousand people who can leverage the technological progress to make significant contributions, and feel something of a noblesse oblige 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)
- easyaspie 11y ago
  i like reason number 2 maybe 'cause literally our life is so boring hehehe sorry for bad english
- floppydisk 11y ago
  It's an interesting angle, and the possibility exists you might be right, however, for the sake of discussion I'm going to push back a bit. A thriving economy necessitates people produce more than what they need to live. This excess gets exchanged with peers in the economy and most everyone benefits. Rather than straight barter, we use currency as a mediator to allow people who couldn't barter directly to still exchange goods and services. Consider the case of the USSR. During one of their many social programs, they turned all the farmland in the USSR into communal farms and struggled. Eventually, they relaxed restrictions and allowed people to start farming private plots of land where they could keep everything they grew in addition to the communal farms and things went comparatively gang busters. People had more food and suddenly they had more food to exchange on the market than the communal farms produced. We are inherently social creatures and if people are surrounded by people who don't work, it creates a social climate that praises non-work over work. I.E. the "extra status" from your contributions is a social construct. Status is a social construct and in this case assumes people value workers and will heap status upon them for their contributions. Take an elite athlete who won a championship and drop him in the middle of grandma's sewing club, he'll have 0 status compared to that group's rock star. Status will only be conferred by people who value it and that might not be the case for people who aren't working. > 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!) There's a difference between "new discovery" and "valuable new discovery" and turning that into something useful and productive.
- PakG1 11y ago
  As I understand it, various nordic countries are quite nice in that people are well-compensated for what those in North America would consider low-paying jobs. This would give people a lot more freedom to do what they like or do what they're able to do (if they have limited skill learning potential) without worrying about their future.
jacalata 11y ago
Most people argue that technological advances made since Jamestown mean that we literally absolutely don't need everyone to work, because we are no longer an impoverished subsistence society.
- floppydisk 11y ago
  I concur, we've made significant technological strides since then and it's nice that we've pushed our standard of living from swampy subsistence to one of the best in the world. However, that doesn't address the thrust of the argument which is if you create a society that rewards sky-gazing it creates the probability of a disincentive to work. Are there counter examples where this kind of society as worked in the past, and if so, why aren't they with us/significantly more influential today?
  - jacalata 11y ago
    I don't think you understood me. Let's say 80% of people won't work if they don't have to (I think thats not true, but to pick a number). Until today, that meant that allowing people not to work meant that society would collapse and everyone would starve because it wasn't possible to produce food and shelter for so many without their help. Today, it is possible due to technological advances that did not ever before exist. Thats why there is no example of it working before but people believe it could work today.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it. Unsurprisingly this didn't end well. >If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work. We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't. It would take an outbreak of unreasonable optimism to claim this is the most efficient and productive of all possible systems - especially considering it's notorious for its many completely predictable failure modes.
- floppydisk 11y ago
  > There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it. The parent's quote specifically proposed the notion of people not working. This doesn't disprove the argument or address the point about the structure of Jamestown's initial income distribution mechanism. > We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't. How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else.
  - Delmania 11y ago
    The claim that Jamestown was "saved by capitalism" is the typical libertarian/conservative story touted out in discussions about socialism and capitalism. The situation was a lot more nuanced than that. The setup of Jamestown as between the Crown and the investors, not the colonists, who were essentially indentured servants for 7 years. Also, the climate was not right for the types of crops the colonists were trying to grow, and as someone else mentioned, the settlers were not accustomed to the environment. "How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else." That's an incredibly naive response. I would venture the author of that comment is referring to CEO and bankers on Wall Street. For the amount these people are paid, it's hard to see how much value they are producing. There is definitely an entitlement mindset.
tormeh 11y ago
I think there's a middle ground to be found here. What if everyone gets the necessities and some basic niceties, and the most productive get the rest? You'd be working for luxury and status, as opposed to necessity, but isn't that motivation enough?
- spydum 11y ago
  some sort of consumerism-socialist arrangement? i suspect youd end up with lot of folks who realize they can sit back and do nothing and sustain themselves. the labor pool of low-income jobs dries up, employers have to raise wages to attract workers, and the price of goods and services goes up. I'm sure there is some balancing point, but we dont know where that is (maybe thats the fear)
- floppydisk 11y ago
  What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live. Necessities + basic niceties in my current area cost a significant multiple of somewhere else like the Midwest USA. In turn, this might incentivize people to move from Midwest USA to other area USA if they're getting more $$$ and thereby raise the total cost of the program.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live. It doesn't really matter, because people can move. You just give the same to everyone, and let people choose whether they prefer to live large in Midwest or frugally/working in NY.
douche 11y ago
I support the idea of a basic income, but only if it is a replacement for the system of piecemeal welfare programs and tax-breaks that we currently have. The entire system could get so much simpler than it currently is. You get your basic income check for X dollars a month. If you work a job, run a business, whatever, in addition to that, you get taxed Y% on your earnings, excluding the basic income amount. No deductions, no write-offs, no tax-shelters. If you wanted to have a progressive sliding scale tax rate, fine, although that makes it more complicated than a flat tax. HR Block and Intuit would scream, but if you could do your taxes with just your W-2 and a four-function calculator, how many billions of dollars could we avoid wasting and invest in a more productive sector of the economy?
- Anderkent 11y ago
  Of course some people need more than just basic income to survive - if your medical expenses are 10x basic income, and you cut out all other welfare, how are those people meant to compensate? There are some kinds of welfare that you can replace with basic income, but not all of them.
  - douche 11y ago
    I should have distinguished, but I wasn't including healthcare. More along the lines of TANF, food stamps, fuel assistance, unemployment, all the other drips and drabs of money that can be applied for if you know about it and can work the bureaucracy. US healthcare is fucked nine ways from sunday; maybe someday we'll adopt something on the Canadian pattern (I've had emergency surgery done in Quebec on vacation, anesthesia, overnight stay, 70-mile ambulance ride, the works - and the total was 1/10th of what it would cost in the US.) Social Security is another sacred cow that you probably couldn't touch, at least until it goes tits up because all the boomers start drawing and there aren't enough of us left to pay in.
  - jeza 11y ago
    I gather you could still have something like Medicare (Australia) with a basic income. It's administrated entirely separately from welfare.
  - 11y ago
LLWM 11y ago
Well, yes. Most people who suggest such things aren't considering what it would take to get humans to work because they assume all the work will be done by robotic slaves.
quesera 11y ago
Bucky Fuller always inspires disagreement, but I think you'd have a difficult time making the case that the Jamestown Colony from the year 1607 is in any way relevant to this discussion.
mcphage 11y ago
"We tried it once 400 years ago, and it didn't work then, so clearly it won't ever work."
roflc0ptic 11y ago
"The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work" To be clear, the people in the colony barely survived because people lacked the sense of self preservation required to work. You're positing that this occurred because they had to share their output; the tellings I've heard were that the aristocrats wouldn't work until another governer (John Smith) came in and made them work on fear of death. The idea that anything about this situation was socialist is not well founded. The idea that the terrible outcome is proof positive of anything in particular is not well substantiated. I prefer it as a story of exactly how far the entitlement of the rich goes: those used to controlling the means of production would rather die than give up their positions of privilege. But it's not proof of my ideological position, and it's not proof of yours. It's just anecdata. The rest is just conjecture, not backed up empirically.
dbingham 11y ago
Comparing Jamestown to today is nonsense. Technology has advanced so much further it's not even funny. We are now capable of nearly completely automating factories. Sure there still have to be people to do that automation and to maintain the machines, but it doesn't take very many people to do that. With industrial agriculture, 2% of our population is producing the vast majority of our food. With experimental ecology based agricultures, we could see a form of agriculture that takes even less work (it's based on perennials, so you don't have to plant every year) to produce just as much or more. If we can sort out automated recycling we will reach a place where we no longer need to mine. Mass transit on rails just begs for automation and provides people an easy way to get around. We are shockingly close to a post-scarcity society. Not quite true post-scarcity, where no one needs to work and automation produces all we need, but a society where we very small handful of people can produce enough for the rest of the world. We'll still need a system that rewards those people, yes, by why punish everyone else? Why force everyone else in working increasingly pointless jobs just because we need to reward the few people actually working necessary jobs? And interestingly enough, we aren't currently rewarding the people working the necessary jobs. If the economy rewarded people according to the importance of their work, farmers would be paid like financial executives. The other part of this coin is that, while there are absolutely lazy people in the world, there are just as many people who will naturally gravitate towards doing some sort of "work". I would argue that most people would get bored and dissatisfied just sitting on the couch watching television all day. Instead they'll spend their time pursuing their passions. For a lot of people this would probably be "useless" art -- music, theater, fiction, etc. But, hey, if we already have enough people doing the useful things, then why not? But for others it will be things like science, engineering, invention, and so on. The first several generations of scientists were men and women of leisure. They were wealthy aristocrats who didn't have to work if they didn't want to. But they did work. They choose to work. They choose to do often incredibly monotonous data collection because they were fascinated by the natural world. There's no reason we couldn't have a world where the vast majority of us are free to pursue whatever we wish. And I'm willing to bet that, in that world, we'd see an explosion of innovation and discovery.
cryoshon 11y ago
Irrelevant example. Jamestown is ancient history, per-industrialization and also by definition of the former, pre-post-industrialisation. Jamestown knew nothing of assembly lines, tractors, robotic fabrication, office jobs, and knowledge work. They never managed to actualize their population's hierarchy of needs enough to reach those levels. We're far, far beyond needing to strike the earth to get fed each day. The real "producers" are mostly machines which extract value from the earth and process it for end-use. As far as the people who own the machines, they are a mere fraction of the human race... seems a bit silly to accommodate them excessively at the expense of everyone else's well being.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work This is a narrative, not a plain fact. Many people continue to do work without incentive. They feel demotivated, they don't need the money and can go live in mom's basement. They do it out of boredom, even habit or inertia. Also, it can be difficult to determine people's incentives, they're not always aware of those themselves, so short of telepathy you can't always claim to know whether one is there or not.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
What about a little of column A and a little of column B? Work gets rewarded, but you have enough to survive (but not thrive) even if you choose to do nothing?
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever. I'd be a lot more inclined to be a bigger proponent for incentive based economies if we all started on a level playing field with equal opportunity. The reality is far from it, and we get phenomena like the working poor, millions of people with jobs, sometimes multiple, who can barely scrape by, in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit. Obviously there has to be a balance in incentives, but I'm inclined to say the US has lost some sense of that balance.
- floppydisk 11y ago
  > It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever. I think you're conflating two ideas. Redistribution of wealth, in my understanding, means taking from Peter to pay Paul regardless of what Paul did. Inheritance on the other hand is Peter accumulated value (money) but decided to save it or invest it rather than outright spend it and gifted it forward. The difference between the two is the level of coercion. In the former, the government is deciding who gets what from whom and how much in a roundabout way. In the latter, the individual who accumulated the value is deciding whom gets what and how much. > in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit. If the millionaires wish to remain millionaires, the money cannot be idle. It has to be invested in value producing activities that generate a return. If they just spend it, they won't be millionaires for long (see NFL stars going broke right after they get out of the league for an example).
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    > The difference between the two is the level of coercion. I'm not debating the role of the state here, I'm showing that two people are born, one with $10m and one with $0, and that it's ridiculous to argue from such a state of reality that one ought to have a fully incentive based economy when one never has to work a day in their life (except walk to a bank, say '30% in the S&P 500 please, 30% in gold please, 30% in US treasuries please and 10% in a money market account please', and collect his check for the rest of his life), and the other can work 2 jobs like many millions of Americans do and barely scrape by. You'd agree that this is a flawed system, no? That's a flawed system, and the solution is simple, the government employs coercion. I can't be against that as long as the coercion is on moral grounds, just like coercion is employed in many other situations (e.g. taxation, or prohibition of buying a slave for 10 years even if that person is willing) You mention coercion as if it's inherently a bad thing. Inheritance tax can level the playing field a little bit, where say instead of one kid, through no merit of his own, inherits $10m by bloodright and the other $0, one can inherit $1m (a gigantic advantage) and 9.000 others inherit $10k (a small advantage). That's redistribution of wealth and it's as much 'coercion' as a regular tax rate. It's not a perfect solution (without flaws) or a complete solution (one that solves every problem), but inheritance tax makes a lot of sense and I reiterate, it's funny people being so hypocritical about it.
digikata 11y ago
One could argue that the current economic system has shifted to increasingly taking labor from the vast majority of producers while providing a minimal amount of compensation, all while a tiny slice get a vast amount of compensation. Because most producers simply don't get enough of a margin above subsistence, a wide range of society dosen't have the resources to make investments in new businesses (or new personal investments) and our economic potential suffers. If too much of the economic excess is concentrated into too few hands we end up with an inefficient command economy. What the BBC article describes to us should strongly hint to us that the current work arrangement is a local maxima in the efficiency of our social/economic system, and that other arrangements should be looked at to yield better social and economic benefits. And honestly, I think that labels such as "Socialism" and "Capitalism" have done a lot of damage in the short-circuiting of analysis of economic systems (ie. in the vein of "This is socialism" we we know that doensn't work...). We really have to move beyond classifying into those broad categories and deciding policy based upon what broad camp one believes in.

Anderkent 11y ago

>why should they if their excess production goes to subsidizing non-producers who stare at the sky all day? There's a lot of room for manouver between 'everyone gets exactly the same amount no matter their contribution' and 'everyone must be productive (net-positive on the society) to sustain themselves'. So, reasons you might contribute when even the sky-gazers can survive at a decent level: 1. Because the extra pay lets you do more fun things 2. Because you enjoy the work 3. Because the extra status you get from your work contributions is rewarding 4. Because you like the people you work with 5. Because you're one of the one in ten thousand people who can leverage the technological progress to make significant contributions, and feel something of a noblesse oblige 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!)

easyaspie 11y ago
i like reason number 2 maybe 'cause literally our life is so boring hehehe sorry for bad english
floppydisk 11y ago
It's an interesting angle, and the possibility exists you might be right, however, for the sake of discussion I'm going to push back a bit. A thriving economy necessitates people produce more than what they need to live. This excess gets exchanged with peers in the economy and most everyone benefits. Rather than straight barter, we use currency as a mediator to allow people who couldn't barter directly to still exchange goods and services. Consider the case of the USSR. During one of their many social programs, they turned all the farmland in the USSR into communal farms and struggled. Eventually, they relaxed restrictions and allowed people to start farming private plots of land where they could keep everything they grew in addition to the communal farms and things went comparatively gang busters. People had more food and suddenly they had more food to exchange on the market than the communal farms produced. We are inherently social creatures and if people are surrounded by people who don't work, it creates a social climate that praises non-work over work. I.E. the "extra status" from your contributions is a social construct. Status is a social construct and in this case assumes people value workers and will heap status upon them for their contributions. Take an elite athlete who won a championship and drop him in the middle of grandma's sewing club, he'll have 0 status compared to that group's rock star. Status will only be conferred by people who value it and that might not be the case for people who aren't working. > 6. Because you don't even consider what you're doing work (you were just playing around with maths and theory, and suddenly new discoveries!) There's a difference between "new discovery" and "valuable new discovery" and turning that into something useful and productive.
PakG1 11y ago
As I understand it, various nordic countries are quite nice in that people are well-compensated for what those in North America would consider low-paying jobs. This would give people a lot more freedom to do what they like or do what they're able to do (if they have limited skill learning potential) without worrying about their future.

jacalata 11y ago

Most people argue that technological advances made since Jamestown mean that we literally absolutely don't need everyone to work, because we are no longer an impoverished subsistence society.

floppydisk 11y ago
I concur, we've made significant technological strides since then and it's nice that we've pushed our standard of living from swampy subsistence to one of the best in the world. However, that doesn't address the thrust of the argument which is if you create a society that rewards sky-gazing it creates the probability of a disincentive to work. Are there counter examples where this kind of society as worked in the past, and if so, why aren't they with us/significantly more influential today?
- jacalata 11y ago
  I don't think you understood me. Let's say 80% of people won't work if they don't have to (I think thats not true, but to pick a number). Until today, that meant that allowing people not to work meant that society would collapse and everyone would starve because it wasn't possible to produce food and shelter for so many without their help. Today, it is possible due to technological advances that did not ever before exist. Thats why there is no example of it working before but people believe it could work today.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it. Unsurprisingly this didn't end well. >If we create a culture that tells people they don't have to work to receive those benefits, it will disicentivize people to actually work. We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't. It would take an outbreak of unreasonable optimism to claim this is the most efficient and productive of all possible systems - especially considering it's notorious for its many completely predictable failure modes.

floppydisk 11y ago
> There was nothing "socialist" about Jamestown. Many of the initial settlers were aristocrats who had no experience of work, and no interest in it. The parent's quote specifically proposed the notion of people not working. This doesn't disprove the argument or address the point about the structure of Jamestown's initial income distribution mechanism. > We already have a culture like this. Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money" believe they're entitled to live off the efforts who don't. How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else.
- Delmania 11y ago
  The claim that Jamestown was "saved by capitalism" is the typical libertarian/conservative story touted out in discussions about socialism and capitalism. The situation was a lot more nuanced than that. The setup of Jamestown as between the Crown and the investors, not the colonists, who were essentially indentured servants for 7 years. Also, the climate was not right for the types of crops the colonists were trying to grow, and as someone else mentioned, the settlers were not accustomed to the environment. "How are you defining work? Money is a proxy for value produced at some point in time and you can either save it or immediately spend it. If someone acquired a reserve of value, how are they living off the efforts of other people? They still must buy goods and services like everyone else." That's an incredibly naive response. I would venture the author of that comment is referring to CEO and bankers on Wall Street. For the amount these people are paid, it's hard to see how much value they are producing. There is definitely an entitlement mindset.

tormeh 11y ago

I think there's a middle ground to be found here. What if everyone gets the necessities and some basic niceties, and the most productive get the rest? You'd be working for luxury and status, as opposed to necessity, but isn't that motivation enough?

spydum 11y ago
some sort of consumerism-socialist arrangement? i suspect youd end up with lot of folks who realize they can sit back and do nothing and sustain themselves. the labor pool of low-income jobs dries up, employers have to raise wages to attract workers, and the price of goods and services goes up. I'm sure there is some balancing point, but we dont know where that is (maybe thats the fear)
floppydisk 11y ago
What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live. Necessities + basic niceties in my current area cost a significant multiple of somewhere else like the Midwest USA. In turn, this might incentivize people to move from Midwest USA to other area USA if they're getting more $$$ and thereby raise the total cost of the program.
- icebraining 11y ago
  What qualifies as the necessities and basic niceties? That's a very broad category that fluctuates based on where you live. It doesn't really matter, because people can move. You just give the same to everyone, and let people choose whether they prefer to live large in Midwest or frugally/working in NY.

douche 11y ago

I support the idea of a basic income, but only if it is a replacement for the system of piecemeal welfare programs and tax-breaks that we currently have. The entire system could get so much simpler than it currently is. You get your basic income check for X dollars a month. If you work a job, run a business, whatever, in addition to that, you get taxed Y% on your earnings, excluding the basic income amount. No deductions, no write-offs, no tax-shelters. If you wanted to have a progressive sliding scale tax rate, fine, although that makes it more complicated than a flat tax. HR Block and Intuit would scream, but if you could do your taxes with just your W-2 and a four-function calculator, how many billions of dollars could we avoid wasting and invest in a more productive sector of the economy?

Anderkent 11y ago
Of course some people need more than just basic income to survive - if your medical expenses are 10x basic income, and you cut out all other welfare, how are those people meant to compensate? There are some kinds of welfare that you can replace with basic income, but not all of them.
- douche 11y ago
  I should have distinguished, but I wasn't including healthcare. More along the lines of TANF, food stamps, fuel assistance, unemployment, all the other drips and drabs of money that can be applied for if you know about it and can work the bureaucracy. US healthcare is fucked nine ways from sunday; maybe someday we'll adopt something on the Canadian pattern (I've had emergency surgery done in Quebec on vacation, anesthesia, overnight stay, 70-mile ambulance ride, the works - and the total was 1/10th of what it would cost in the US.) Social Security is another sacred cow that you probably couldn't touch, at least until it goes tits up because all the boomers start drawing and there aren't enough of us left to pay in.
- jeza 11y ago
  I gather you could still have something like Medicare (Australia) with a basic income. It's administrated entirely separately from welfare.
- 11y ago

LLWM 11y ago

Well, yes. Most people who suggest such things aren't considering what it would take to get humans to work because they assume all the work will be done by robotic slaves.

quesera 11y ago

Bucky Fuller always inspires disagreement, but I think you'd have a difficult time making the case that the Jamestown Colony from the year 1607 is in any way relevant to this discussion.

mcphage 11y ago

"We tried it once 400 years ago, and it didn't work then, so clearly it won't ever work."

roflc0ptic 11y ago

"The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work" To be clear, the people in the colony barely survived because people lacked the sense of self preservation required to work. You're positing that this occurred because they had to share their output; the tellings I've heard were that the aristocrats wouldn't work until another governer (John Smith) came in and made them work on fear of death. The idea that anything about this situation was socialist is not well founded. The idea that the terrible outcome is proof positive of anything in particular is not well substantiated. I prefer it as a story of exactly how far the entitlement of the rich goes: those used to controlling the means of production would rather die than give up their positions of privilege. But it's not proof of my ideological position, and it's not proof of yours. It's just anecdata. The rest is just conjecture, not backed up empirically.

dbingham 11y ago

Comparing Jamestown to today is nonsense. Technology has advanced so much further it's not even funny. We are now capable of nearly completely automating factories. Sure there still have to be people to do that automation and to maintain the machines, but it doesn't take very many people to do that. With industrial agriculture, 2% of our population is producing the vast majority of our food. With experimental ecology based agricultures, we could see a form of agriculture that takes even less work (it's based on perennials, so you don't have to plant every year) to produce just as much or more. If we can sort out automated recycling we will reach a place where we no longer need to mine. Mass transit on rails just begs for automation and provides people an easy way to get around. We are shockingly close to a post-scarcity society. Not quite true post-scarcity, where no one needs to work and automation produces all we need, but a society where we very small handful of people can produce enough for the rest of the world. We'll still need a system that rewards those people, yes, by why punish everyone else? Why force everyone else in working increasingly pointless jobs just because we need to reward the few people actually working necessary jobs? And interestingly enough, we aren't currently rewarding the people working the necessary jobs. If the economy rewarded people according to the importance of their work, farmers would be paid like financial executives. The other part of this coin is that, while there are absolutely lazy people in the world, there are just as many people who will naturally gravitate towards doing some sort of "work". I would argue that most people would get bored and dissatisfied just sitting on the couch watching television all day. Instead they'll spend their time pursuing their passions. For a lot of people this would probably be "useless" art -- music, theater, fiction, etc. But, hey, if we already have enough people doing the useful things, then why not? But for others it will be things like science, engineering, invention, and so on. The first several generations of scientists were men and women of leisure. They were wealthy aristocrats who didn't have to work if they didn't want to. But they did work. They choose to work. They choose to do often incredibly monotonous data collection because they were fascinated by the natural world. There's no reason we couldn't have a world where the vast majority of us are free to pursue whatever we wish. And I'm willing to bet that, in that world, we'd see an explosion of innovation and discovery.

cryoshon 11y ago

Irrelevant example. Jamestown is ancient history, per-industrialization and also by definition of the former, pre-post-industrialisation. Jamestown knew nothing of assembly lines, tractors, robotic fabrication, office jobs, and knowledge work. They never managed to actualize their population's hierarchy of needs enough to reach those levels. We're far, far beyond needing to strike the earth to get fed each day. The real "producers" are mostly machines which extract value from the earth and process it for end-use. As far as the people who own the machines, they are a mere fraction of the human race... seems a bit silly to accommodate them excessively at the expense of everyone else's well being.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

> The colony barely survived because people lacked the incentive to work This is a narrative, not a plain fact. Many people continue to do work without incentive. They feel demotivated, they don't need the money and can go live in mom's basement. They do it out of boredom, even habit or inertia. Also, it can be difficult to determine people's incentives, they're not always aware of those themselves, so short of telepathy you can't always claim to know whether one is there or not.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

What about a little of column A and a little of column B? Work gets rewarded, but you have enough to survive (but not thrive) even if you choose to do nothing?

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever. I'd be a lot more inclined to be a bigger proponent for incentive based economies if we all started on a level playing field with equal opportunity. The reality is far from it, and we get phenomena like the working poor, millions of people with jobs, sometimes multiple, who can barely scrape by, in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit. Obviously there has to be a balance in incentives, but I'm inclined to say the US has lost some sense of that balance.

floppydisk 11y ago
> It's funny the people championing 'incentives for work', thereby turning 'redistribution of wealth' into some kind of mortal sin, simultaneously brand inheritance (redistribution of wealth by bloodright/nepotism) as a 'death tax' and act as if it's the worst thing ever. I think you're conflating two ideas. Redistribution of wealth, in my understanding, means taking from Peter to pay Paul regardless of what Paul did. Inheritance on the other hand is Peter accumulated value (money) but decided to save it or invest it rather than outright spend it and gifted it forward. The difference between the two is the level of coercion. In the former, the government is deciding who gets what from whom and how much in a roundabout way. In the latter, the individual who accumulated the value is deciding whom gets what and how much. > in the same economy where others are born literally a millionaire without any basis in merit. If the millionaires wish to remain millionaires, the money cannot be idle. It has to be invested in value producing activities that generate a return. If they just spend it, they won't be millionaires for long (see NFL stars going broke right after they get out of the league for an example).
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > The difference between the two is the level of coercion. I'm not debating the role of the state here, I'm showing that two people are born, one with $10m and one with $0, and that it's ridiculous to argue from such a state of reality that one ought to have a fully incentive based economy when one never has to work a day in their life (except walk to a bank, say '30% in the S&P 500 please, 30% in gold please, 30% in US treasuries please and 10% in a money market account please', and collect his check for the rest of his life), and the other can work 2 jobs like many millions of Americans do and barely scrape by. You'd agree that this is a flawed system, no? That's a flawed system, and the solution is simple, the government employs coercion. I can't be against that as long as the coercion is on moral grounds, just like coercion is employed in many other situations (e.g. taxation, or prohibition of buying a slave for 10 years even if that person is willing) You mention coercion as if it's inherently a bad thing. Inheritance tax can level the playing field a little bit, where say instead of one kid, through no merit of his own, inherits $10m by bloodright and the other $0, one can inherit $1m (a gigantic advantage) and 9.000 others inherit $10k (a small advantage). That's redistribution of wealth and it's as much 'coercion' as a regular tax rate. It's not a perfect solution (without flaws) or a complete solution (one that solves every problem), but inheritance tax makes a lot of sense and I reiterate, it's funny people being so hypocritical about it.

digikata 11y ago

One could argue that the current economic system has shifted to increasingly taking labor from the vast majority of producers while providing a minimal amount of compensation, all while a tiny slice get a vast amount of compensation. Because most producers simply don't get enough of a margin above subsistence, a wide range of society dosen't have the resources to make investments in new businesses (or new personal investments) and our economic potential suffers. If too much of the economic excess is concentrated into too few hands we end up with an inefficient command economy. What the BBC article describes to us should strongly hint to us that the current work arrangement is a local maxima in the efficiency of our social/economic system, and that other arrangements should be looked at to yield better social and economic benefits. And honestly, I think that labels such as "Socialism" and "Capitalism" have done a lot of damage in the short-circuiting of analysis of economic systems (ie. in the vein of "This is socialism" we we know that doensn't work...). We really have to move beyond classifying into those broad categories and deciding policy based upon what broad camp one believes in.