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?
Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
31–40 of 186 posts
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#32I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711
I also like working. But I don't particularly like working to make someone else rich.
Create your own company then.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#33If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares!
Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.
Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends.
Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#34The 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…
What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#35If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and…
> Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.
This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#36Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.
100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#37Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.
100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.
Capitalists can't just raise the price of goods, unless they're in a cartel which is illegal in most of the western world. They'd be unable to coordinate thanks to competition. It's a double-edged sword, they can't coordinate to save the earth or uplift humanity, but they also can't coordinate to stamp down the proletariat.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#38The 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…
What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?
No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's global corruption index.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#39The 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…
This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
#40The 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…
The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees. Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully. But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable. So why won't this work in the general economy ?
I can tell you that I gave my best during my 5 years at the IDF solely because I knew how well I would be paid afterwards if I did well, and I got directly hired at a FAANG. I can say the same about almost anyone I've known during my service across all programming units and beyond. Even the ones who knew they would stay did it for the chance to become Lt. Colonel and then director afterwards as a civilian. As for the ones claiming to be motivated by patriotism, they too usually ended up pursuing more lucrative venues.
As for IDF jobs with less potential, they are usually accomplished by people with fewer ambitions doing much less than their best and placed there because of that (think of military HR, secretaries, nurses, cleaners).
In short, there are no surprises. The Israeli military service is just a minor inconvenience in the path of ambition that is fueled by the capitalist spirit of the general economy, rather than being a replacement for it.