Are you paid to look busy?

I'm in the same boat. Some weeks I simply do not have enough work to fill the 40 hours I should work according to my contract. I'm just sitting around, looking busy, and billing those hours to the project I'm assigned to. If I report fewer hours than that I'm in trouble, because my billable hours go down and that means I'm getting a smaller bonus at the end of the fiscal year..

Yeah, the system isn't really working.

Thanks. I hope someone could look up a discussion on this soccer goalie example: I never really understood it.

Is the example above saying goalies would do the "more productive" thing of standing still more often if they didn't feel the pressure to look like they were doing something? If kickers evenly spread out their shots, you got a 1/3 chance no matter what you do. It wouldn't matter if the goalie went always left or always right or just stood there every time. And if goalies are being irrational, why aren't kickers exploiting it?

Though I agree that you shouldn't be penalized for standing still, that doesn't make jumping right or left "fake work".

that is a perspective issue - my salary is annually negotiated , in compensation for an idea of what work will come up and how i will better myself and the company. It is not how many hours worked in a week. I don't get a "weekly" salary. having this different perspective in mind allows acceptance of the time shifting that comes along with knowledge work - inventing and creating are not on a linear scale.

Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. On top of this, Bucky lived through an education transformation, going from a society in the late 1800s which had a global illiteracy of 85% to a complete flip to 85% global literacy--in his lifetime. He talked about this a lot. He also saw that many jobs, even in his day, were being automated, i.e. that humans were no longer required to be "muscle-reflex" machines. A lot of these ideas inspired that quote.

In a world where our political, financial, and corporate infrastructure supports "doing what needs to be done", in terms of benefiting all of humanity, we can then apply the "earning a living" quote. But only when we have a system setup to support the last sentence in the quote.

If you are not one of the "one in ten thousand..." then you should be studying or preparing to develop your own breakthrough that benefited humanity and become a "one in ten thousand" in the process.

> And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread

I think this is always going to be problematic because once wealth gets concentrated it's going to be very hard to redistribute it, short of some revolution or coup. And I sense that this is going to be especially hard in democratic countries where there's a very close nexus between elected representatives and wealth holders; US, India being prime examples that I could think of.

An alternative is to have systems and institutions such that wealth concentration doesn't even happen in the first place. Also I believe wealth gets concentrated by systemic and institutionalized transfer of wealth from middle and poor class to a selected few rich and not because those who are wealthy are geniuses or are contributing proportionately to society.

I can think of a few examples of systemic, institutionalized wealth transfers that are happening right now.

1. Riding on others hard work: A labor working in inhuman conditions with peanuts for wage producing textiles which are sold with profit margin of a few thousand percentages.

2. Privatizing essential services: Poor/middle class persons having to pay out regular health premium and still live in fear of getting their claim rejected and end up paying through their nose for smallest of diseases, medicines.

3. Rent seeking: Natural resources (oil, spectrum etc.,), licenses, monopoly, forced software contracts, patents and such.

4. Crony Capitalism: Govt bail outs for failed private institutions that have caused massive financial crisis which in itself was a wealth transfer from poor to rich of a scale that was perhaps unheard of.

5. Crony Capitalism: Tax payer's money getting transferred to weapon's manufacturers and private military contractors who in turn are going to protect the interest of private oil corporations.

6. Riding on others hard work: Illegal or institutionalized collusion among private corporations to suppress the wage by not allowing free labor market.

7. Resource transfer: Government snatching massive tracts of farming land from the poor farmers and giving them away to private corporations for pittance.

9. Erect massive blockade to democratic institutions so that the common citizen, for whom they were meant for in the first place, will have no choice but to resort to middle men and shell out huge sums. Courts (lawyers, out of court settlements etc.,), parliaments (lobbyists) etc.,

If I look at the list of wealthiest people, rent seeking behavior and riding on cheap labor jumps out!

Sure, they probably deserve to be wealthier than above average, but does the wealth they have accumulated is proportional to their social contribution?

The intersection between those who have contributed to advancement of our civilization in whatever small way and the rich people is almost an empty set. That's a clear enough indicator that those who are very wealthy really don't deserve it and in fact snatched the wealth from others to start with!