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Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#131

Post by dkarl »

crabmusket wrote: post #54

> There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for. I'd like to offer some comfort to the author on this score. Food, housing, healthcare broadly... while these are all…

> The food system is different from homecooked meals

This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they get enough food when they need it. Food quality has nutritional consequences down the line, and at some point a child that is fed pancakes every day will gain the ability to look back and regret how they were raised, but it doesn't prevent a child from feeling cared for in the moment.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#132

Post by steveBK123 »

avhception wrote: post #61
Tade0 wrote: post #46

> But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. My experience (and I believe it to be common) is that I'm really, really, really out of spare energy to care about anyone or anything else. Mind you, I'm in my best shape in years and I've explored my limits to find out they're actually way further than I originally thought, but still.

There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of. It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that. The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility. And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunction…

It was the same problem for JIT supply chains falling apart during COVID.

It's very hard to sell slack to management and so in "well run organizations" it ends up trending towards zero. And then everyone is surprised at the resulting catastrophes.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#133

Post by mrweasel »

closewith wrote: post #88
mrweasel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes down to the many meaning of the word "care" in English. The state is certainly willing to accept way greater risk than the individual parent, in many circumstances. If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adult…

>The state is certainly willing to accept way greater risk than the individual parent, in many circumstances. I don't think that's true. > If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adults per child (but also less obviously). That…

Those ratios are heavily debated in Denmark for being absolutely terrible. Parents have been complaining for years that the ratio of especially children for 4 to 6 are awful (typically 7 children per adult).

They might be a improvement in other countries, but they are considered a move in the wrong direction here, because they are worse than previously.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#134

Post by downut »

delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

"...baker who gets up at 3 am..."

But those 3am bakers are being exterminated by at scale corporate chains, no? Generalizes to just about anything that could reasonably be described using "artisanal". Social atomization inexorably spreads, and after thinking about it pretty hard for many years of travel putting eyeballs on "artisanal" processes I don't see any possibility of any other outcome. So we enjoy what is left.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#135

Post by Gare »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #125
Gare wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually... they kinda can? If they don't work, they get deported back. Also they are in debt to the agency that got them here. It's a hair above modern slavery the way it currently works, especially in EU countries with more... lax standards than Germany.

>If they don't work, they get deported back. lol, nice joke, how many illegals has Germany for example deported? Deporting people in the EU is a huge hassle and the source countries often don't want to cooperate in taking back people. You'll have to murder someone to actually get the authorities in the EU go through the hassle of deporting you, but refusing to work shit jobs isn't enough to get you deported, just hav…

> lol, how many illegals has Germany for example deported? Deporting people in the EU is a huge hassle and the source countries often don't want to cooperate in taking back people.

> Plus they can also claim asylum once they get here to escape their slave employers and not get deported.

You are confusing two groups of people. One group consists of illegal migrants, usually from MENA countries that claim asylum and are a hassle to deport back.

Migrant workers usually come from southeast Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines..) and there is no problem sending them back because those countries are considered safe. Also they got families back home, their motivation is not really to stay here long term but to earn a decent amount of money (from their perspective). And despite sometimes poor treatment and shitty jobs, EU is a much better place to work than gulf countries.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#136

Post by anonylizard »

delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples.

Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean.

But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all', look at the great scientists, Newton, Von Nuemann, all the people at bell labs etc. These people create titanic economic value in their wake, and they are motivated by passion, which heavily mixes altruism with self interest.

Indeed, the 'developed economies' are precisely the ones that also allow 'care' to scale, that's why we have social welfare, that's why we have free education.

Its that 'Care' doesn't scale, its that its impossible to centrally monitor and control. People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#137

Post by pkphilip »

delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

This is only true to an extent. Self-love only goes so far.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#138

Post by User23 »

pschoeps wrote: post #124
k__ wrote: post #107

I assumed the opposite. Knew a women who worked 100% as foster mom. Had 3 children at a time, age 6 to 13. Everything was well organised. It seemed to me, child care can work pretty well of it's your main job and you get paid by the state.

This seems more like a very skilled caregiver to me, I would be absolutely overwhelmed in this position.

Which is quite remarkable, because up until less than a century ago when women “entered the workforce” virtually every woman who had ever lived somehow managed to care for her 3+ children.

Incidentally, large families do scale sublinearly with respect to the parents. The reason why is that even with merely natural spacing by the time they have a fourth child, the oldest is in a position to provide significant assistance. Every mother with a large family that I’ve spoken to confirms that the difficulty peaks with the third child and then plateaus.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#139

Post by cnr »

delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

"The story, then, is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn’t imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about. The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.”

"Debt", David Graeber

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#140

Post by bell-cot »

croes wrote: post #129
delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

The countless hours of voluntary unpaid work by many people shows don’t act only for their own benefit

True-ish. But try talking to some old folks, about the vastly reduced scale of such volunteer work since (say) the 1950's. That "voluntary unpaid" stuff would include religious organizations, civic groups, housewives, ...
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