Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#451

Post by pandalism » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #350

moffkalast wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the neat part, you don't. At least as far as the younger generations is concerned there is no future for us, even if you don't include climate change. Laying flat / quiet quitting, etc. movements are not accidental.

Laying flat is completely different though. It's the realization in china that their efforts will never amount to meaningful rewards, hence they scale down the effort to what's absolutely necessary for survival. Living without a home and only working maybe 1 day a week to get enough food to not die. Equivalent in Europe would be to just be homeless and get by on social security, US probably getting by on food stamps.…

Might be a nitpick this doesn't seem like a sword of Damocles type scenario, that implies the constant, and extraordinary, risk of decisions taken from a position of power, aka you get the throne but the swords there ready to kill you for a minute action/decision and you lose it all.

I'm not sure what would be a more apt parable, something about being a leaf in the wind, or trying to swim upstream, aka powerless that no matter what you decide, how you act, bigger phenomena than you is the only thing that matters?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#452

Post by chrisrhoden » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #417

captainbland wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The masses work because they want to consume For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs. This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of li…

They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without. I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.

The argument you are responding to is that people work full time and consume at that level because a step function in compensation (esp including healthcare) makes working part time infeasible even on rice and beans.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#453

Post by georgeecollins » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

throw0101c wrote: post #444

georgeecollins wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone wants more John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to…

> John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true tha…

TIL! Thank you.

Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#454

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#455

Post by throw0101c » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #218

Jtarii wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krugman is a bitch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJXALBX3KM

I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life. If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.

Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small:

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...

A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:

> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.

* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke

He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...

This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:

> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]

* https://bcf.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Webinar...

More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:

* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018

Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#456

Post by Ma8ee » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #354

Ma8ee wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year? While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave wo…

> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids. Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury an…

I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.

I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#457

Post by smcg » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

materielle wrote: post #78

Quinner wrote: post #9

For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and po…

Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning. One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives. Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the…

Have you seen the lists of members of rich people's group chats? Rich people coordinate much better than non-rich people.

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#458

Post by circlefavshape » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #436

doctorwho42 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.

Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your respon…

Have you been neglecting to pay your child support?

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#459

Post by shimman » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #231

shimman wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5]. All these programs poll above majorities in th…

>but you have to pay for the privilege too... You are not considering the fact that if there are robots to do everything, then they won't be interested in you paying them. This applies to the programs that you listed as well. The equation changes completely when automonos robots do everything. >now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Tel…

If you don't understand how elites have used the US military to strong arm their holdings throughout the world, IDK what to tell you. US imperialism is a real thing that has existed for the last 120+ years, it has also only benefited a small minority of rich Americans.

See the banana wars, see the US oil interests in the middle east. These are just two major examples.

Acting like the US won't do this again when the elites have captured the political apparatus is the foolish part, especially when this is the current operating procedure at the moment (protecting money over basic human rights).

Re: Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

#460

Post by doctorwho42 » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

throw0101c wrote: post #440

doctorwho42 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.

> I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. Perhaps one was/is sometimes a stretch, but starvation and famine were a thing: > Over two million people died in two famines in France between 1693 and 1710. Both famines were made worse by ongoing wars.[127] > As late as the 1690s, Scotland experienced famine which reduced the population of parts of Scotland by at least 15%.[128]…

I was never implying famine wasn't a thing, it has toppled empires...

But to say one season of bad harvest will kill off everyone is ludicrous...