Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
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Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#2Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#3Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#4Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
>Otherwise the work goes undone.
Or migrants get imported to do the work that goes undone, see EU.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#5Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
Or maybe it's time to stop missing the forest for the trees. Not being paid enough is hardly the primary issue. We desperately need a crash.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#6I see the media has lost it's fascination with blaming millennials for everything that's wrong in the world. Gen Z, buckle up!
(I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
Or maybe it's time to stop missing the forest for the trees. Not being paid enough is hardly the primary issue. We desperately need a crash.
Asset prices are not wages. The latter is necessary for workers to survive, the former are imaginary numbers. One would expect the requirement to both cram down asset prices and push wages up for a healthy economy. It’s pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
“A crash” is just a Rube Goldberg wealth redistribution mechanism (wealthy people own the vast majority of securities and real estate). I argue a crash isn’t what’s needed: much more housing supply, robust antitrust enforcement (to keep monopoly pricing in check), efficient healthcare, living wages, and high progressive tax rates are what is needed to right the ship.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#8"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote.
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#9Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
The problem around here seems to mostly be there is no housing at all for slog-worthy workers. You can con them into taking out crazy college loans they'll never pay off and an individual can remain in denial about astronomical healthcare and nonexistent retirement prospects during their day to day, but workers have yet to develop the ability to teleport to and from work so that no housing needs to be built near these poorly paying jobs.
Re: Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe it's time to stop missing the forest for the trees. Not being paid enough is hardly the primary issue. We desperately need a crash.
Asset prices are not wages. The latter is necessary for workers to survive, the former are imaginary numbers. One would expect the requirement to both cram down asset prices and push wages up for a healthy economy. It’s pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet. “A crash” is just a Rube Goldberg wealth redistribution mechanism (wealthy people own the vast majority of securities and real estate). I argue a crash isn’t w…
The issue is that there's entirely too much "short term thinking", which is code for "there is no one to speak for the middle class any longer". Yes, it's magic numbers and estimations stamped as iron-clad all the way down, but notions of a "healthy economy" are strictly contextual. "Software is eating the world" (h/t a16z), "1bn VR users by 2027" (zuckerberg), "100k starting" -- there's a clear imbalance, and sometime after '99 the economic model clearly shifted from "enable a better life" to "controlled demolition". We even saw bankers get paid for it!
IMO it doesn't matter if you believe in fire or in ice, either will suffice. There's only one way forward.