181–190 of 477 posts
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"I wish I worked more" - said no one ever on their death bed.
"I wish I achieved more" -- said a large number of people as they died.
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Indeed. It never seems to never occur to some people that emergent behavior, arising from the (mis)alignment of incentives in a complex system, can give rise to behavior so bizarre and purpose-directed that it all seems deliberate -- as yet is nonetheless emergent. The whole system is a fractal, all the way to the top -- there are many uber-wealthy folks whose experiences are subjectively as miserable as Bukowski's w…
Our current global economic system was intentionally designed by (and for) a very small Elite, over roughly 4 centuries. Those at the very top are certainly not typical victims [1] of the system they carefully create; indeed, history shows they constantly and incrementally revise it to their benefit. [1] They're only victims if they go too far, trigger civil unrest, and wind up on the losing side of the guillotine. "…
We haven't yet found a way to fairly spread privilege in our societies, so we're stuck with the least worst system, but I would note that globalisation has actually raised living standards in many countries from India to China, in spite of, or perhaps because of its deleterious effects. People always want to hoard wealth (almost everyone does this, even those at the bottom), and it's hard to change that. It remains to be seen whether we can effectively temper human desires and spread that wealth and not end up in dystopia, but please don't try to blame things on a secret elite directing a carefully created system - it's a mirage and is not helpful. There are many contending forces vying for prominence in our societies, and in many ways corporations are more powerful than people or politicians (NB a corporation is not a CEO, it is a composite body).
The guillotine you mention was actually far worse for the ordinary people of France than for the aristocracy (many of whom simply fled) - terror and denunciation was used as a weapon on moderate politicians and everyday citizens, and even eventually the chief proponent of its use.
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> you don't work, you don't eat That's not life. It's just a rule that comes out of the fact that people won't care about you if you give them no benefit. It's only natural but is it right or humane?
That's not life. You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others. World average income equals the USA poverty line. That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive. Charity, yes indeed, but there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead. The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely, not…
i dont believe this to be true (tho i'd like to see any reliable sources).
I find it more likely that a small number of people control so much "productivity" that the majority must either be "coerced" into cooperating in order to get some of the crumbs, or that they lack the basic resources to dig themselves out of the poverty hole. Its true that they aren't productive enough to support themselves, but i would imagine they would if they had the chance.
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> you don't work, you don't eat That's not life. It's just a rule that comes out of the fact that people won't care about you if you give them no benefit. It's only natural but is it right or humane?
That's not life. You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others. World average income equals the USA poverty line. That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive. Charity, yes indeed, but there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead. The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely, not…
There are some exceptions. You don't have to work a single day in your life if:
- you inherited wealth.
- you are homeless and sustain yourself with whatever you can get without paying.
- you commit crimes and are put in prison.
- you are a woman and merry well.
- you build something as a hobby and it makes big.
> That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive.
That would be true if people were source of wealth. But source of wealth for many years now are the machines, and this wealth increased disproportionately to increase in population. If on average we are coming out of poverty at slower rate than the growth of wealth our machines produce then something is wrong.
> The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely
Almost no one gives anybody anything freely. Do you think your employer would give you anything for your work if he didn't have to?
The ones that have more have it often because they exchanged something worth less for something worth more. The ones that have less have it often because they exchange something worth more for something worth less.
Why they do it? Because exchange often is not free. Lot's of people have no choice but to exchange good that is very valuable for them and irreplaceable (such as hours of their life) for something as plain, abundant and worthless in our modern world as food.
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And is willing to live in fairly shitty places. (You're not retiring on $25K a year in any part of Boston, NYC, Seattle, or any other reasonably vibrant urban area without making brutal compromises in terms of quality of life.)
There are plenty of areas that are cheaper than Boston, NYC, or Seattle, and yet not "fairly shitty". For example, $25k a year can be quite comfortable in Denver, which is a reasonably vibrant urban area.
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> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible. What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.
I think you grossly misunderstood what I said. What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare. The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.
Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.
You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.
The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.
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Indeed. It never seems to never occur to some people that emergent behavior, arising from the (mis)alignment of incentives in a complex system, can give rise to behavior so bizarre and purpose-directed that it all seems deliberate -- as yet is nonetheless emergent. The whole system is a fractal, all the way to the top -- there are many uber-wealthy folks whose experiences are subjectively as miserable as Bukowski's w…
Our current global economic system was intentionally designed by (and for) a very small Elite, over roughly 4 centuries. Those at the very top are certainly not typical victims [1] of the system they carefully create; indeed, history shows they constantly and incrementally revise it to their benefit. [1] They're only victims if they go too far, trigger civil unrest, and wind up on the losing side of the guillotine. "…
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This is part of why the "rat race" works/exists. People are always looking up to see who is above them, never down to see how far they've come. "I IPO'd for ten million dollars! Life is awesome!" quickly transitions to "Frank IPO'd for 5x what I did! That's not fair!"
But that's human nature, we're designed to always keep climbing up and striving for more. It is not healthy to constantly compare yourself with people who are worse off. Sure, it induces a sense of gratitude to know that you have clean drinking water and no threat of being killed by a warlord today (unlike many people in Africa, for instance), however if we settled for that, there would never be any incentive to impr…
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Life cannot be sustained without effort. Does real freedom entail freedom from the demands of reality? The question I have is, whose obligation would you say it is to provide a job that you consider good enough?
Perhaps society and its culture as a whole. Directly, it could be the community you live in or perhaps government. Two examples: 1) I read an article where the writer took a job somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast in a non-heavily developed area. When he gets to the village he has no place to stay. How will I live? What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot…
how is this different than borrowing money from a bank to get a house built? In the village, the westerner had a debt - sure it was verbal, but it is a debt never-the-less. This method don't work when the size of the village grows beyond a certain point (because you cannot keep track of more than about 100 people without needing written records and formalizatin).
Fast forward a few hundred years, and you end up with what we have right now - a system of money, credit and work. Its exactly the same, except with way more indirections so that the participants don't have to directly know each other and keep tabs on each other.