Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever • Hacker News Board

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#221

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:04 AM UTC

mirko22 wrote: post #207

doliveira wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, minimum wage jobs mostly won't expect you to work beyond your normal periods and days, but they definitely won't want you working less than that. The weirdest part, though, is voluntary taking several months or even a year between jobs. Now that is proper privilege.

Why though? You don't know in what conditions he spends that time. He might live in a way you would not like to live without a job so you think of not working a privilege.

Because one of the big concerns of almost everyone who isn't in high demand is gaps in CV. For some reason it seems that - and it's definitely believed that - employers will look very unfavorably at you if your history of employment isn't continuous.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#222

Post by rikroots » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #115

I'm a huge fan of sloth. I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week except for genuine emergencies (things like outages; being behind schedule never counts), and I'm close to drawing the line at four days a week. I always take at least three weeks off a year, and that's in a bad year. I take "mental health days" often and with no guilt. If you…

I decided, 3 weeks into my first full-time job (as a lab technician) that I profoundly disagreed with the concept of the capitalist work ethic. The idea that a person's life had meaning only if they stayed in work - often boring, tedious work - until their retirement day, after which they could be kicked onto the old-person's scrapheap to do fun stuff for a few years (if they were lucky) until dementia took their dignity and their memories and their final breath ... I hate that concept.

I have, over the years, walked out of well-paying, high responsibility jobs (Civil Service, IT) because the stupidity of the petty empire building and office politics became too much to bear. Sometimes I've been in a situation where I had saved up enough 'rainy-day' money to give myself time off to do other stuff - finally get a degree, write some books, work on an open-source project or even, yes, spend a couple of weeks staring at a wall while I daydreamed. When I've had no money, I've taken welfare cheques, or worked in menial zero-hour-contract manual labour jobs to keep food on the table, or started fresh in an entirely different service/industry.

Things I've learned:

1. Know how much money you need to survive with a roof over your head and food on the table. If you're earning more than that, you're in a good place.

2. Your job title and the numbers printed on your payslip do not determine who you are. Measure your worth in the relationships you have with your friends, family and work colleagues. Measure it in terms of your mental wellbeing.

3. There is no such thing as 'idleness'.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#223

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

alephu5 wrote: post #188

BurningFrog wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different perspective. I see work as the way we contribute to society, how we help others with things that are important for them . In return, other people work on things that benefit me . This is how we can live in wealth and peace unimaginable to most of history. This is a fantastic historic achievement, and I want to keep it going. I do agree that we are much more than just workers, of course. But that fe…

I'm in my late 20s and used to believe something like this, but I've become quite cynical. I think that modern work is just about capturing wealth and passing it onto the wealthy, so they can have more control over their time and can enjoy the fruits of our labours. I think people conflate the above with "wanting to contribute to society and benefit others" because you're not usually willing to pay for things that do…

> Of course in principle it's possible to have a company that balances a healthy profit with a useful and beneficial product, but in practice a vast majority of companies will abuse its customers and employees as much as legally permissible if it increases the incomes of the upper echelons. At least that's my view.

Survival of the fittest. Competition on the market guarantees that, over time, the companies that do useful things and balance that with profits and employee needs will die off, while companies good at maximizing revenue by any means necessary will flourish.

That's my cynical realization. Both too little and too much competition on the market is poison.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#224

Post by 0-_-0 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:20 AM UTC

bmcn2020 wrote: post #171

From the article: "Recalling the famous example of the pin factory that Adam Smith used to explain the division of labour, Russell imagined a new technology that will halve the amount of time it takes to make a pin. If the market for pins is already saturated, what will happen? In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time th…

> Can regulation fix this?

What if it was illegal to work more than X hours per week? X=20 for example.

Actually, let me answer my own question: Everyone would need to have 2 jobs, and every company would employ twice the number of people.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#225

Post by Joker_vD » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:21 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #122

3pt14159 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason this didn't happen is two fold. First, workers gain skill by the hour. It's more efficient to have forty hour work weeks for a workforce of half the size than twenty hour work weeks with the same size. Second, many things in the economy are arms races. Housing[0], cost of education, status goods, actual arms for our militaries, etc. We have enough productivity for things like food to be very, very cheap bu…

Zeroth, the more unemployed, the more downward salary pressure on the employed. edit: the reasonable expectation is that half of the workers are fired and the remaining workers' salaries are cut. The Luddites were a result of noticing technological improvements lowered wages and employment at the same time.

It's kinda weird how the labour is almost always in oversupply.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#226

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:24 AM UTC

megameter wrote: post #54

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From above, we can only conclude that capitalism and profit-oriented economy are insane I don't see the conclusion. I can only see there are many specific problems with capitalism.

A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices. But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market…

But what will happen when we get to that point? What world will these algorithms create for us? Will it be the utopia of Earth in Star Trek? Or will it be a "Disneyland with no children"[0], once economy becomes fully self-contained and eliminates its dependency on humans, leaving Earth to be inherited by machines endlessly working and trading, with no sentient being to see it or enjoy the fruits of that labor?

--

[0] - A phrase coined by Nick Bostrom, in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies":

"We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children."

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#227

Post by Joker_vD » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:26 AM UTC

throwaway45349 wrote: post #107

rainonmoon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a familiar Peterson talking point, society has in many ways sublimated our nature for the broader collective good. Addressing the problems of capitalism would be another step in that progress.

Nah, I disagree. Capitalism is the most natural system because it accepts what we are - selfish beings in a competitive environment. If we didn't specialize and trade skills/products/services, we'd still be a hunter-gatherer species. The system is what kept us going, not what holds us back. It only looks like oppression in 2020 because of how easy the rest of life is.

Capitalism cannot be the most natural system simply because it's only barely 300 years old. Before that, there was a whole slew of different ways to organize production and distribution. Primitive tribal communes, large tribal unions, agricultural slavery, feudalisms of varying shapes... and that's only in Europe.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#228

Post by doliveira » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #221

mirko22 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why though? You don't know in what conditions he spends that time. He might live in a way you would not like to live without a job so you think of not working a privilege.

Because one of the big concerns of almost everyone who isn't in high demand is gaps in CV . For some reason it seems that - and it's definitely believed that - employers will look very unfavorably at you if your history of employment isn't continuous.

Not just that, being able to afford months and months without salary is quite a privilege, even on relatively high wages like a developer's. Not to mention if you can do that while on minimum wage jobs, you probably aren't a major source of income for the family.

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#229

Post by agent008t » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:43 AM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #33

Xophmeister wrote: post #24

Why did Keynes believe that, say, a doubling of efficiency (through technology) would half work time for everyone? Sure it’s a solution to the equation, but so is what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. This halves the costs, which facilitates price reduction and thus a competitive edge. Did Keynes believe that benevolence would win over profit? Don’t get me wrong, I wish it had, but that seems a…

> what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. The article says as much: > In a sane world, Russell thought, the factory would simply halve working hours, maintaining the same wages but greatly increasing the time that the workers could devote to the joys of leisure. But, as Russell observed, this rarely happens. Instead, the factory owner will opt to keep half the workers on the same hours and lay of…

Is the sane solution then not some sort of encouragement of greater stock market participation? Where when the "factory owner" wins, everybody wins, because everyone has shares in the factory?

Then the incentives are aligned - the more productive, technologically advanced the economy is, the greater your stock returns and the better off you are.

Is that not more or less the case for many people that have lived in the developed world for generations? You do not need to save a lot every month in order for it to compound into a meaningful stock ownership after 200 years. Median household net worth in the UK is £300'000, and that includes many many recent arrivals. For comparison, with a net worth of £500'000, you could draw ~£15'000/year in perpetuity if you wanted - is that not a much better alternative to UBI?

Re: Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever

#230

Post by ThePadawan » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

benhurmarcel wrote: post #209

caymanjim wrote: post #115

I'm a huge fan of sloth. I frequently take many months off between jobs, sometimes a year or more. I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week except for genuine emergencies (things like outages; being behind schedule never counts), and I'm close to drawing the line at four days a week. I always take at least three weeks off a year, and that's in a bad year. I take "mental health days" often and with no guilt. If you…

40h/week with 3 weeks off/year isn't anything out of the ordinary. If anything it's quite a bit more work time than most European workers. Taking months between jobs and going to 4 days/week is more uncommon though.

My own experience as a Software Engineer in Switzerland:

- A lot of companies are ok with 80% (most often that means 4 days of full time work). Some aren't, but especially towards more experienced roles, it's not out of the ordinary at all.

- 40h is actually somewhat rarer. I've been interviewing recently and lots of smaller companies think it's a point of pride to have 45h or 43h weeks. When you point out to them that this 12.5% rise in hours should also come with a 12.5% pay rise, they are baffled how you would come to that conclusion.

- 4wk vacation is the mandatory minimum. 5wk is nice and often available.