111–120 of 186 posts
Theoretically it's fine, why not. In practice, who would opt to coordinate twice as big group of people with halved worktime?
Why don’t we have half as many people working 80 hours then?
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> In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work. From TFA: > In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009…
Sounds lovely, I wonder why they abandoned it for agriculture.
Agriculture is great for a small number of generations for everyone and then you can’t go back without mass death.
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That is point. The wheels, the engine, the frame, hundreds of other things... You can't point to one part a car and say "that's the bit that actually gets us from point a to point b" (It's also a jab at the intellectual bankruptcy of Atlas Shrugged)
I am still confused. So are you implying the engineers who think they are the engine of the world incorrect or not?
In plainer English: it's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers who think they few highly skilled individuals produce the majority of the economic output of the world.
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And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace. But even beyond that there's armies of skilled necessary work that skilled workers can not replace either but seem to forget exist. Apple doesn't exist without massive sophisticated logistical support but no one ever points out that the naval architects at Maersk or the welders at their shipyards are one piece of the process tha…
> And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace. I think this is false. Unskilled work is easy to teach and learn, by definition. All you need is an "army" and the unskilled work can be easily fulfilled.
I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.
Compared to costs
We know mainly why costs are too high in the Bay Area, and it's mostly housing. Which is a solvable problem, if only the market was able to expand housing supply.
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So if you get a degree, it’s really the book publishers, librarians, and coal burning electricity plant that kept the lights on who deserve most of the credit?
Their contribution was necessary, I mean it's utterly facile but: you weren't gonna get a degree from a university if the university doesn't exist. There's a billion or so people in addition to them and a few billion more that got us to this point. It's not that there is no such thing as individual achievement it's that there is no "small minority" skilled or unskilled that the modern economy can be reduced to.
But there absolutely is a small minority of extreme producers in most domains.
The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…
--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)
I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.
> Wages are too low. Compared to costs We know mainly why costs are too high in the Bay Area, and it's mostly housing. Which is a solvable problem, if only the market was able to expand housing supply.
If only.. there was more land. Building houses is not the bottleneck. Land is. You'd have to create a 'second floor' of land to mitigate the problem.
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> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in…
>forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, What do you mean "forgetting"? I pay those people for their services out of the money I earn. They're not doing all those things out of the goodness of their hearts, they worki…
Like doctors are highly paid for a number of reasons one of which is cause the APA restricts the number of doctors that can be trained, but also because of the nature of the finance of healthcare in America, and the cost of training doctors. None of those is determined purely based on the market really.