> I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".

I imagine we'd have an abundance of pilots, and actors and a severe lack of toilet cleaners.

Personally I think there are more people than you think who would be perfectly happy to clean toilets as their contribution, so long as they were compensated fairly for it.

Isn't that the entire point of the free market? To find the price that incentivizes the necessary level of production of a good/service?

The alternative is a central authority setting prices, which has historically had disastrous results.

Well, in romantic theory, yes. But unfortunately, society doesn't value folks that clean toilets and folks that clean toilets need income to buy food, shelter, and other things. The balance of power seriously works against the person cleaning toilets, and they have no real power over the wages they are paid.

The market forces that determine pay are more competition between folks that hire others to clean toilets. If all of your competitors pay twice as much as you, you might not have quality employees... or any at all, if a job is readily available. If you have a lot of folks desperate for income, you can pay less. If there are few folks that are willing to clean toilets, you probably pay more. You could go without folks to clean toilets, but your average Western accountant probably isn't going to clean the office toilets or breakroom willingly unless it becomes standard for office jobs everywhere. Many places simply cannot leave dirty facilities - and in some jobs, you probably would rather have separate staff cleaning (hospitals, for example).

Luckily, there are a lot of levels between "unregulated, free-market-will-take-care-of-it" and complete control from a central authority. Minimum wages, worker rights, workplace safety, safety nets that ensure less desperate people, and so on.

If the supply of people able and willing to clean toilets is great compared to the demand for toilet cleaning service, the wage for toilet cleaners will be low.

We can redistribute profits from investors to low wage workers like the people who clean toilets, but the consequence of that is lower return on investment, and with it, lower rates of investment/economic-growth.

In the long, policies that lower economic growth rates are very detrimental to all classes of workers. What increases wages for people like toilet cleaners is high levels of production relative to population.

Investment is the mechanism by which we increase production, and profits are how 1. resources are distributed to those who are most effective at growing the economy's level of production 2. people are incentivized to invest to increase production.

There's no escaping economic laws, and no free lunch from policies that redistribute income from high income earners to low income earners.

There are other alternatives. Money isn't only kind of compensation that counts. Once I've covered my expenses - food, housing, transport (that can be public transport if I'm in an area where it's adequate), and medical, I don't care much for extra money. I know this is true, because I have fairly slack hours at the moment and could use my free time to make more money, but I choose not to because I have enough.

Other compensation that I'd accept instead - social status, respect, ability to spend my time in beautiful places and talk to interesting, educated people, opportunities to work in interesting buildings or locations, opportunities to work for organizations that I believe in, ability to have more kids, and live in a community that sees childrearing as a community responsibility. All these things are easier to find if you have money, but they're not exactly things money can buy.

The "necessary" level of production as far as people are able to pay for it. In the iterated free market game power is not equally distributed, which directly affects people's ability to negotiate pay for their work.

Another way is to keep the free market as a price discovery mechanism, but introduce a mechanism that counteracts the tendency to accumulate wealth.

That would mean raising prices, and thus the toilet cleaner him/herself wouldn't be able to buy the things that you want them to reach anyways.

Rather, the toilet cleaner would be able to buy things previously unattainable, and the person who hired the cleaner would have less free cash to spend on other objectives, which would cause a slight drop in the price of those other objectives.

Raising the income of a toilet cleaner doesn't correspond to a general rise in prices. It might mean the development of self-cleaning toilets, which isn't a bad idea.

Legislatively redistributing profits from investors to workers has the predictable long term consequence of reducing the rate of return from investing and with it, the volume of investment and labour productivity growth.

Margins aren't as generous in other fields as in IT.

Yes, and then pay the toilet cleaners even more, raise prices again, and so on. A virtuous upward cycle which would eventually bring their lives more in line with everyone else's.

How did it bring someone's life in line with everyone else when they're still unable to buy the things other people can buy? Do you realise that once the cleaner is more expensive than a Japanese toilet is to maintain, the cleaner will be fired and will have nothing instead?

So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person? What's wrong with that? We all get better toilets out of the deal, too.

The public bathroom still needs cleaning itself, though. Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom? That would be interesting!

> So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person?

I once had a summer job as a manager of this issue - my job was to find a cleaning company and assure quality in one company building (roughly 500 toilets, around 30 cleaners). From my experience, these people were unable to properly do their jobs (not the cleaning part, stuff like opening windows so the toilet doesn't smell like acid and actually dries, not forgetting to clean something...). None of these people would be able to or would want to invest the time to learn to repair the incredibly complex Japanese toilets - they will rather live on welfare. Of course it's anecdotal and I'm sure that a lot of people will do just what you said - most certainly not everyone though, and there won't even be place for everyone, rather like every hundredth at most.

> Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom?

Yes, there are "toilet boxes" that can clean the whole thing including floor, ceiling and walls.

Futile - one repairman needed for every N cleaners. Same with all automation - in fact its the entire point of automation - its cheaper to use machines that require very little human intervention including repair, than humans, to do some job. Until that's true in fact, robots aren't used because they aren't cheaper. In a total cost of ownership sense.

The salary of cleaners would rise until enough people are willing to do the job or it is more profitable to install self-cleaning toilets.

> The salary of cleaners would rise until enough people are willing to do the job or it is more profitable to install self-cleaning toilets.

or we could pass laws to bring in temporary workers from other countries and keep the wages down.

Why do pilots and cleaners need different wages, Is there something a pilot needs to live comfortably that somehow a cleaner doesn't?

The confusion here is because you are mixing up "wage", "a living", and "lifestyle cost".

Wage is compensation for labor and follows all of the normal market rules of supply and demand.

A living relates to the amount of money needed to pay for them to live. Rent, food, etc.

"lifestyle cost" is the above plus non-necessities.

Wage has zero relation to a living, and lifestyle cost. Your wage doesn't go up just because you want to spend more money at brothels in nevada, and it doesn't go down just because you stopped needing to spend as much money on food because you got a costco membership.

Or to put it simply, the rate of your labor has zero relation to your wants and needs.

Hmm, so minimum wages don't exist and when the cost of living rises wages never adapt to accommodate it. I think these concepts are far more linked than you suggest.

>Wage is compensation for labor and follows all of the normal market rules of supply and demand. //

It only follows those rules because those able to influence it have brought in that regime -- USA has been wetting its corporate pants over the idea that the hierarchy of wages might be broken by communism for some time. (Not to say communism is good, just it amuses me how they had to demonise communists - coming over here with their egalitarianism, trying to treat everyone as a person, embodying the maxim of 'being created equal' - in order to maintain capitalism and keep the peons/proles in their place. I digress.

Wages can reflect a person's worth to the owners of a company (they're worth X, because they bring us X+Y leading to profit) ...

OR they can reflect that people are "equal before God" and that one person's time is worth the same as another.

But, my time is worth more than their's -- well great, you can benefit society all the more.

But, no-one will work unless you use greed, selfishness, subjugation of others to motivate them ... well let's just keep mass murdering each other every 50 years or so we can keep the corporate masters in the style they're accustomed too.

Adam Smith pondered this 250 years ago. His writings on the subject are still some of the best.

>Why do pilots and cleaners need different wages

supply and demand

"The last few years I cleaned toilets for a living, but I decided that sucked, so this year I'm a project lead at Google."

I'll bet there are trash collectors that earn more than commercial pilots on second tier carriers.

Wasn't that myth debunked since it essentially happened to only a bunch of guys in NY ?

I personally know a small group of second tier pilots that only get paid peanuts. Something like $40k/yr, and unlike cleaners, they're mandated by a federal agency with teeth not to take a bunch of overtime.

Here's a pretty good introduction to how labor pricing works:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapte...

"and a severe lack of toilet cleaners."

not a problem because we probably would have selfcleaning toilets by then by default.

Toilets built by the underemployed pilots and actors? :)

You know not everyone is interested in becoming a pilot or an actor, right?

You know you're missing the point, right? There are some jobs that people just don't tend to enjoy or find meaningful. You can incentive people to do them by paying them lots of money, but that doesn't necessarily make people happy or fulfilled while doing the work, which was the original topic of this discussion.

We already have some for public loos.

They're somewhat terrifying cubicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fw9hxMCBdU

I don't think it would be as extreme as a full career change. There exists a very large startup cost to becoming a pilot. I'd think to measure the number of people motivated to those as "failed actors", people who tried to make their career as an actor but eventually moved on to other things. Isn't that what we already have today?

Maybe that would lead to all adults cleaning up their own shit so that "toilet cleaner" wouldn't have to be someones job title. I think that might be the least likely of all the hypothetical outcomes though :/

Made me think of this qoute:

" I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

Well, today is a national holiday for me but about a dozen of us have to be at work (long story). For the next three hours, short of an emergency situation, we have literally nothing to do. No cellphones, but half of us are playing X-box (not networked). The other half are surfing the web, two of those are trying to find a way to watch the world cup despite our security filters. I would much rather be walking a dog on a beach, or flying fighter jet. My point: what we want to do with our free time is constantly limited by current circumstance. Letting kids do whatever the want, within the limitation that it must happen inside the classroom, will inevitably result in X-box and we surfing.

How about this: Give the kids a fire pit. I'd bet that most of them would rather learn how to start and maintain a fire than play x-box. I know I'd rather be chopping wood than sitting in an office chair.

"Fire pits and power tools good for preschoolers" https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/parenting/little-kids/pre...

I've met US teenagers who don't know how to use matches.

Have you tried reading or learning? I've always a book in my bag for unexpected breaks. Depending on the topic or book, you can easily go from something else to reading and back to work.

A month ago there was a thread about the "one book that changed your life": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17168136

I read Mindset by Carol Dweck since then and found it very interesting (and applicable to some parts of my life and behaviour).

>> Have you tried reading or learning?

Lol. When I was at basic training (Canadian military) we of course didn't have cellphones or computers, but were allowed books. The image burned into my mind is of my platoon on a rainy day in the woods. Everyone is in camo/weapons, huddled together to keep warm while waiting for a truck … reading game of thrones. Those novels were better protected from rain/mud than any weapon.

I have a dozen projects that I could be working on. But it is a Sunday. Canada day. Tomorrow is also a holiday. The bosses aren’t here. Other than us and the guards, the building is empty. Nobody is in the mood for the never-ending stream of online courses we are supposed to work on in our free time. It is Xbox and the web until quitting time.

Is this really so hard to figure out? Very few people would do things which are useful to keep civilization running if they have a choice. Look at what people do with their leisure time - watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty.

> watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty

Because that's all most people can do after 8-10 hours (+ commute) of soul-draining work, and then some household chores. Let's not assume that this is the default of human leisure just because it's all people have energy for after hard day of work.

NEETs might provide a strong example that this is the default of human leisure. In my experience most NEETs lament their lack of motivation. It's possible that their depression is a result of adverse societal pressure, but I posit that most humans lack the ability to structure their time without an external motivator.

It's often said that pain is the best teacher, but it is also common to refer to "the carrot or the stick". Pleasure provides motivation just as great as pain. Lately on Hacker News people have discussed addiction to smart-phones, referring to the dopamine hit resulting from notifications. We also see this with television series, where people will spend hours of free time binge-watching a show. It may well be that we can no longer control ourselves.

A recent science-fiction piece[1] references this phenomena: "I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications" and "Normally I just fulfill my smart contracts and go back to reading Deleuze and Guattari, by which I mean I play first person shooters while the pdf is up on my other monitor".

Hikikomori provide another interesting example, perhaps without the social pressure; although I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about Japanese society. It's been too long since I've read them; but the books "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" and "Welcome to the NHK" may provide some insight.

While I would like to think that humans are intrinsically motivated to _do_, experience shows me that most people are content to merely consume. Technology engineered to keep us scrolling only seems to exasperate the issue.

[1] https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-eco...

> While I would like to think that humans are intrinsically motivated to _do_, experience shows me that most people are content to merely consume. Technology engineered to keep us scrolling only seems to exasperate the issue.

Reminds me of the concept of interpassivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpassivity. We maybe be intrinsically motivated to _do_, but we have developed technology that can satiate this desire, e.g. watching someone else play video games on twitch.tv.

I hadn't heard of interpassivity before. It's an interesting concept and I think that it fits my own experience. Interpassivity is truthy.

But how come that's what most of jobless people do, too?

First off, that sounds like baseless speculation. Second, there might be a causal relation between lacking motivation/interests and being jobless. It's not a representative sample of the population at large.

Jobless people are often stressed.

Jobless people aren't often just jobless. They're stay-at-home moms. They're people on disability. They're people with medical or mental conditions. They're people stuck in welfare trap - they get just enough money to make it not profitable to work (they'd lose it if they went to work, but no entry-level job will pay them more than the amount they get from welfare), but not enough to support any creative hobby. Or they have jobs - on the grey/black market, so that they can get both benefits and some shit untaxed pay.

Absolutely, and there is also a perceived risk by many people that if they become to active or vested in a non-work activity that it will negatively impact their source of income.

I don't think it would be as bad as you think.

If you wanted to remain living in your ideal world, you would make adjustments to your life for the sole purpose of maintaining your lifestyle instead of just thinking "meh, someone else will do it".

I have to think if this were built into how we lived for hundreds of generations, then your mindset would even change from "maintaining my lifestyle" to "this is what we do to keep everyone happy".

I'm not a hardcore socialist either. I'm almost the opposite. I like the idea that if someone puts in a lot of effort, they should have a lot of success. I have no sympathy for people who want to just watch TV and expect to be carried by society. But, at the same time, I would much rather live in a world where everyone was happy doing what they love, and everything just worked out without the concept of money.

The world you describe, that's the problem with all those wishful thinking like communism. Just a tiny detail, like 'if people wouldn't be selfish but work for greater good', and all would be better. On that I agree.

Where we would probably disagree is how realistic this is - to me, on truly global scale (not some isolated ie swiss/swedish experiment but places with properly f*cked up work mentality and life attitude like russia or any post-war country), it's very, very far from reality. I won't live long enough to see even a glimpse of what we discuus.

Not that it makes me anyhow happy, but it's important to have a realistic view on important variables. Everybody has a dark side. I've seen even the best and brightest and hard workers to slack badly once they lose motivation, ie changing jobs. Better have a system that accepts these flaws and still extracts value for society even in non-ideal way, rather than working with some ideal human being that is simply not out there.

a) Why is that a bad thing? It's bad for the people themselves but arguably it's not terrible for society as a whole. Better than those people going out and getting into trouble, for instance.

b) I imagine that in a world without meaningful work, having meaningful hobbies might be seen as trendy. Just like eating poorly and being unfit signal low social status today, being a media-consuming couch potato would be considered low-class.

Well, if the world we're considering is one where magic provides all our necessities plus a bountiful UBI, then I agree with you. But I didn't think that that was the world we were discussing.

Yeah, I'd spend all day every day just reading.

>I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".

Shorter.

As much as I'd love to follow my heart, I also know that the things I find personally interesting aren't the same ones I'm good at. Alas, it's also in a field where only the very best make any money at all.

There was this old zenn diagram of the four factors to life that comes to mind.

https://i.imgur.com/i52vIDj.jpg

Did you mean to write "Venn diagram", or this was the joke?

I agree. What the invisible hand of the market and society at large value rarely align with what an individual values (and enjoys) -- a cosmic joke of the human condition imo.

As in asking the question to other adults or to asking it of one's self?

If the first: I agree, it would be interesting to see the changes. Would we see more of Google's 20% time?

If of one's self: I think many do. I don't think the change would be as large. I already see many people spend their time on projects they are interested in. And I've seen that work be discouraged in favor of the assigned tasks/priorities. That discouragement can lead to a negative feedback loop of discouraging others.

There wouldn’t be civilization, we’d all die pretty quickly at the hunter/gatherer stage.

People will move on from what they want now and want to impress people. What better way than give meat to the village. That may lead to a marriage with the elder's daughter.

Eh, that’s why we work on what we don’t want to for money now.

You should look at GORE as an organization. [0] They work closely to this idea of contributions to their organization.

[0] https://medium.com/swlh/get-3-billion-big-by-staying-small-p... (There are a few articles linked throughout with a significant source list at the bottom of the article.)

> What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?'

Marshall Brain's "Manna" is an interesting exploration of this question.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm