The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

You’re going to get a bunch of static because of the objectivist leanings of all the “temporarily impoverished tech billionaires” on HN and pg’s rare miss of an essay about the scarce reagents of the United States manufacturing economy during the Cold War.

But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.

The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.

The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?

The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.

The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.

Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.

Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).

The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.

The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.

The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.

This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.

Time will tell whether the individual solution works better. I suspect 401k saving will not provide many people a stable retirement.

Obviously this depends entirely on the country and region.

My grandfather immigrated to Australia in 1948, got a job assembling cars at the Ford plant, and worked there until he retired.

My Grandmother never worked. They bought a very nice house, had two boys, never really had any debt, plenty of money in retirement.

A generation later my Dad was earning $10k/year as a teacher, and my mum and dad bought their first very nice home for $30k.

So today how many people earning $100k/year can buy a home for $300k?

(As reference, my partner earns $78k/year and bought a modest home for $480k the month before covid. Now there is not a single home in this small town for less than $600k.)

Gimme a good argument why good conditions should diminish, or deteriorate, despite the fact that workforce productivity, as well as corporate margins, have been growing steadily ever since.

We will see what statistics say and what the trend will be in a few years, but if labor goes up for the same output then mathematically productivity has to go down, which has a variety of consequences, but I can think of 1) less capital market yields; 2) less tax income from governments. Both 1 and 2 have nasty impacts on pensions. I am not saying one way of thinking is better, I am just pointing out the obvious fact that there is no free lunch. Workers might get a better deal now, to be handed a bad one when they retire. Unless technology comes to the rescue and helps us keep increasing productivity, but it’s not realistic to rely only on tech.