> needing to sell all of your time/energy to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth and still being told you're not good enough is depressing as all hell.

This is how it's always been. So that doesn't hold water.

I think the problem is, and you touched on this in your original comment, is that some people don't get a chance to "sell their time/energy".

The unemployment numbers being quoted everywhere are a joke. Those numbers exclude discouraged workers who exit the economy and those people are the likeliest to off themselves.

That's not how it's always been. Americans work unusually hard. In fact, medieval peasants often got more vacation time than Americans did: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...

The U-4 (unemployed + discouraged workers) for March was 5.3% as opposed to the U-3 (unemployed) of 5% [1].

1. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Tyler Cowen writes: "You sometimes hear there is no evidence of automation putting people out of work, but arguably the automation of manufacturing, plus IT-enabled foreign competition, are significant factors behind this trend."

See the graph here:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/02/the...

Male participation in the wage economy peaked right before the recession of 1958. We have now seen 57 years of decline. Women's participation in the economy peaked in the late 90s. How many decades of decline would you need to see before you feel you seeing a crisis?

Hm, I wonder how they hack these numbers together. I just made up my own unemployment metric, absolute unemployment. A-U = Population - Employees. For US. A-U = 308 mil. - 140 mil.(1) which suggests there is about 55% of the population who are not currently employed. So, A-U - U-4 = the approximately 50% of the population who don't need jobs I guess.

1.http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

Population in that case includes children and the retired.

Albeit, I hate using the phrase "retired" here. Retired for most simply means the equivalent of someone being born into wealth retiring at age 0.

Anyway, there are around 75 million kids, so real figures are something like 40% unemployed. But a lot of people are working under the table, no longer in classical employment, etc.

Though hopefully the kids are also doing something as well besides just factory public schooling. Figure 1 in 4 is 14-18 and they might have some part time job, albeit unlikely.

There is a fundamental shift to consider, though. A hundred years ago regardless of employment figures most people were farming and by farming that meant the whole family worked together to eat and provide shelter for themselves, and raise enough money to buy that which they cannot provide to themselves.

>a lot of people are working under the table, no longer in classical employment

I suspect this isn't a choice but a result of labor saturating the traditional market.

I upvoted both of you but you seem to contradict each other.. now I start to question my clarity.

I think capitalism became very good at optimizing for profit and it pushes aside faster than ever anything that stays in it's path (and now that's more and more people).

>We severely undervalue social value for material value

Unfortunately the market has spoken: material value.

> Unfortunately the market has spoken: material value.

Society is what we make of it. We still have a choice.

Also, kudos to everyone up the chain in this subthread; this is the discourse I expect when coming to HN.

> the market has spoken:

The extent that the market is a free market is much debated.

I should have used quotes (") around market but I already used my quota of quotes today..

"Underlying social value" is oh so much harder to measure. whose social; whose value?

I have had the privilege of working with someone who grew up very poor. But he had a fully intact, loving, extended family, and as a result, he always knew who he was. His family was also relatively high status and that afforded him opportunities for seeing leadership up close.

Contrast this to people of affluence I've known who've stopped even having a reflection in the mirror. Their identity just disappeared.

>We severely undervalue social value for material value, and we're suffering horribly for it.

I don't think there's wide agreement on just what constitutes social value once you get down to the detail level.

It's surprisingly hard.

I just don't understand "selling all your time and energy." I just don't see that happening. Maybe it's because I've been in all-consuming projects before and a regular 9-5 just seems simple to me now. But even when it was all-consuming, there was plenty of slack time.