Ok, so do it. Get some like-minded people who want to live free of industrial society and go hunter-gather in a national park, or the deep Amazon rainforest or some other out of the way place.
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The Abolition of Work (2002)
141–150 of 236 posts
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in maki…
Sustain yourself just means not die in your text. But there's more to it than that. Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society. Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component i…
Fair enough, but even including all those extras that stil puts the cost at maybe $150/month? That assumes cooking for oneself, not buying a lot of meat or other expensive products etc. On that budget, you will probably not eat worse that a median human.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free. This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the price…
Homelessness is largely not a housing supply issue. In my country you can quite easily get government welfare payments for an unlimited time which can realistically cover housing and all essentials. And yet we still have a load of homeless people. The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happ…
> The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses
Housing may only be one part of the picture, but housing-first policies have proven to be the most cost-effective way of solving homelessness: https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/sep/14/less... and https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find people who argue scarcity more often than not don't have actual numbers to back it up. Amongst human beings biggest necessities, what are actually scarce? Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in…
> I find people who argue scarcity more often than not don't have actual numbers to back it up. Amongst human beings biggest necessities, what are actually scarce? Scarcity in the economic sense just means there are material limits to the things people want. It's not a synonym for "rarity." > Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. The places that are throwing out food also have charities and food banks…
The person to whom you are responding spoke of necessities, you speak of scarcity as the fact of demand exceeding supply. Clearly the crux of your disagreement is what is involved in a good life and society. The argument against your view is that human desire is not fixed, but expands with the development of every new frontier of consumption. The more we can produce, the more we want. Should we let that process run indefinitely?
The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.
There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them. This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our soc…
> This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society. No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.
The grandparent of your comment suggested that unemployed people are shamed because they don’t contribute meaningfully to society, in that they don’t produce anything or provide any services. Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society. Sure, they use pension money to make money for themselves, but pensions don’t depend on that.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives. > They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?
> A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice? Choice, of course.
So taxation is voluntary? You'll upset a lot of libertarians with that attitude!
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#147I am a capitalist libertarian, with anarcho-capitalist sympathies, and I too support the long-term abolition of "work" as we know it. Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (amon…
> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free. This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the price…
> yet the prices of houses continues to rise
Or, the value of the money continues to decline.
If you measure house prices in bitcoin over the past 10 years, then house prices have been in decline relative to bitcoin. This trend is likely to continue for some time.
Under disinflationary money, houses will become a consumable rather than an attempt to store wealth. The cost of housing will decrease over time (although wages will also decrease over time). Having a home sat there not collecting rent will cause you to lose money.
The desire to redistribute wealth will hit a hurdle when the wealth owners can store it in their heads and have it be completely unseizable, plausibly deniable and undetectable anyway.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society. No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.
The grandparent of your comment suggested that unemployed people are shamed because they don’t contribute meaningfully to society, in that they don’t produce anything or provide any services. Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society. Sure, they use pension money to make money for themselves, but pensions don’t depend on that.
> Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society.
Thats your opinion, but it's not something that can be assumed to be true. Its equally likely that you just don't have the education and experience to perceive their contributions as valuable. Lots of people say the same thing about professions they don't respect such as artists, educators, police officers, mental health professionals, dog walkers etcetera. It says more about the person holding the opinion than the profession itself.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite the claim that there is no alternative, there is something invisibly worthy in claiming that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live. Who knows what that inertia may lead to? The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.
Yeah... um... how about making sure we have an alternative that not only works , but works better , before we get to the destroying part?
The traditional vision of a total revolution in which the old regime is destroyed and utopia is born phoenix-like in its ashes is unhelpful. Rational conservatism advises in favour of the stuttered and experimental socialisation of ownership and services. Socialising health, housing and transport, and dispersing wealth throughout society through progressive stock remuneration for workers and/or a fixed ownership stake in an economy-wide index fund at birth, could lead to the gradual emergence of a qualitatively different kind of society.
Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.
In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work. The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
What the hell. How do you suppose energy, transportation, raw materials, fertilizer, paved roads, markets for distribution, etc. would materialize to allow for that 1% agriculture worker population to feed anyone?