At present 'success' in practice is basically synonymous with 'resource consumption'. At a guess that is going to be a very sticky connection that might even be wired in at the biological level; it seems to be quite consistent across the different cultures I know of.
It is not possible to liberate people to pursue success by improving the social safety nets. People who use their free time to advance society are as rare as hens teeth; even most of the productive people use their free time to advance their own interests or their immediate families interests.
I think there is a good argument for making sure everyone has few-questions-asked access to ~9,000 kJ/day of food and some sort of safe housing to live in. We live in wealthy times. But a social safety net isn't going to set people up for success in any way that is meaningful to most people.
I find that a very sad view. Many people I know can't start a business or do risky things because of food, shelter, medical insurance/premiums. I know I'd jump if I knew that if/when I failed, I wouldn't be destitute.
Right now, doing such is primarily relegated to inheritance, familial money, or miraculously winning it 'big' (Horatio Alger stories). They have the cushion. They can fall back to safety within family money. They have connections.
We don't have any of those things going for us. But then again, people also think we're just too lazy or unmeaningful. No, we just know what's being risked, and we can't make that choice with the threat of destitution.
The bottom goes pretty deep in the US.
I believe that's a personal thing, some people would, but most wouldn't. Some people would get hyper productive if everything was taken care off, others would barely leave their flat.
> I know I'd jump if I knew that if/when I failed, I wouldn't be destitute.
You wouldn't be in Western Europe. Yet, very few people jump and take a chance. I don't think that the effect is that large, if it exists at all - don't forget that social safety nets come at a price: (very) high taxes, lots of regulation, entrepreneurship isn't looked at the same way, the systems are rather static.
This reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Ethics of Greed"
In a macro sense, biological life/evolution, economics, and production of goods points to innovation and efficiency gains being made by risking one’s time/enengy/resources in hope of creating a new local efficient outcome.
Free time has nothing do with that.
We also know that stress and poverty actually reduce the brain's capacity to think, and even moreso, a child who suffers from stress/hunger/general poverty has a stunted brain development due to exposure to stress in their formative years. So, naturally, we can say that not having systematic stressors like hunger, economic insecurity, health concerns, etc. would lead people to have greater capacity for wonderful things.
With that narrative, many scientists in history were not people that didn't have to do some of these boring things. They were people that filled their free time with experimentation and other observations.
Of course, that is just one narrative to fit to the data. I'm sure there are others. But it is not just incumbent on one side to give evidence. Can you point to evidence that free time is not beneficial? Observationally, as a parent, forcing my kids to have boring free time has led to them doing/learning as much as forcing them to productive learning time. (Indeed, I've grown sympathetic to the argument that productive learning time often isn't either of its claims. )
I'm not sure there's a linear relationship between free time and scientific progress, but people need free time to scratch their itches, and sometimes this itches progress our understanding of the world.
I like our world isn't wonderful as is.
Imagine what a peasant from 300 years ago would think seeing what their work would be value at today.
Its peanuts in our perspective, but not starving is a start, eating meat would be a luxury, being able to see a doctor.
Hating ourselves is trending right now, sad.
Do you think our world isn't incredible, and by far the best a human could ever hope for so far?
Wow. I am without words.
All I can say is, some people have bigger imaginations than others and being a slave to capital is not always paradise.
The bit about the king completely misses the point. Again, I would hope that in 300 years, technological progress UNDER ANY SYSYTEM would afford "miracles" in the eyes of kings or peasants. jfc.
I’m not sure I see a case where the economic machine speeds up by giving people limitless free time.
I like the idea of a safety net for healthcare btw, bc even privately we pay too much, and the current system sucks to use, pay for, experience, etc. A world where the basics are given sounds nice, but there are a seriously concerning amount of people that are wildly lazy (I wish there was a dataset to measure this I was aware of, but I’m going off of the towns I grew up in and people I knew.)
Just with the arithmetic of 5ish% of unemployment. People who start working under a net can only be 5% of population. People who stop working or work much less could be up to 95% of population. Much bigger percentage has possibility to work less under that system.
Of course more people would take advantage of the system, but Americans overall as a society don’t like excessive laziness and put pride in some amount of work being done. Not working and being poor is frowned upon generally. To keep things loose, this is true for at least greater than 50% of the country.
Western Europe has vast social safety nets going way beyond "the basics". Yet you don't see an explosion of innovation, culture, art, philosophy or what have you. They may not be related, or a full belly isn't hungry and doesn't look for ways to fill itself.
And sure, you could argue that they don't cover the basics, but you'd have to expand the understanding of basics, tbh. Germany gives you shelter, food, health insurance, money to spend on culture, public transportation, free education including university, a TV etc pp. That's beyond basics in my book. Sure, a car isn't included, but you don't need one either.
Spend a year in France (or Germany for that matter), you’ll realize that the social safety net isn’t as good as it is, but also that a lot of things you wouldn’t notice. France has a shit-ton of food innovations you’ve never heard of, great universities, the world record on rail speed, vibrant local theater life in almost every town. You just can’t know about those things if you’re not there, just like people outside the US have no idea what life is like in the US.
After a certain point it's a language and population thing, and France has a language barrier compared to english.
That's not to say that it couldn't be random that a lot of the recent advancements happened in the US, I just don't find it likely.
In other words, the film makers are not subject to the market forces, they don't need to make something that the audience actually wants. The official stats of the PISF (polish state institute which funds movies) say that only 4 out of hundreds funded movies have recouped the state investment via tickets and other sales. The rests are flops, which is not a problem for anyone involved. That's how you get bad art.
I'm not attacking European universities and companies, I'm not arguing that there isn't any great research, I'm saying it's not a multiple of the US, which it really should be if "have a strong social safety net and the possibilities are endless" was true.
I don't that social safety nets play a large role - for most academics, researchers, engineers, artists, there's a de facto social safety net (via tenure, high income, patents, equity, stock options, grants, strong job security etc), so a general safety net doesn't improve their situation and output. And having a general safety net also doesn't by itself increase the amount of people of exceptional skill and/or ability.
I'm not against safety nets (though I do believe that we've gone too far and have created strong negative incentives), but I do believe that "our society will be like Star Trek" doesn't hold water. We have them, and our societies aren't like Star Trek.
Sadly, the way the universe works, any such system is open to free riders who take more than their share.
Tragedy of the commons.
The only solutions we've found so far are:
1. Assign people control of what they create, so they can benefit from their own efforts, and are thus incentivized to make those efforts. Side effect: People who didn't/can't create much have a really hard time (this is what you're concerned about).
2. Assign control of what people create to a central authority that redistributes it evenly, and also have that central authority kill anyone who tries to change or exploit the system. This hasn't tended to work out well.
2. All people should have the right of food. I don't care how much you make, who you are, or whatever. You live, and that's your right. We should be working on automated farms so we can grow this locally.
3. Same, for water.
4. If you don't have a place to sleep, we provide you one. May not be big, but a place to sleep and call home is essential in solving homelessness. And it provides a way out of the poverty trap.
5. Communication should be inexpensive. I would prefer free for lower bandwidth. Its an essential for jobs and so much more. An internet connection is one of the biggest ways into self sufficiency.
Even this humble level of safety net that you propose is incredibly expensive. Who does the hard work of building the small apartments? Who comes out and works on the plumbing when it clogs? And who picks up the trash every week and takes it to the dump? Who runs the water plant, the electrical plant, and who runs the fiber out for even the free, slow tier of internet? Who makes the base model of phone or laptop that everyone would be entitled to? Who tends the robots at the automated farm? Who polices the buildings and neighborhoods full of all these otherwise-indisposed inhabitants? Who provides medical care?
Answer: The Government. The Government offers decent pay for all these dirty jobs, to keep these resources available even to those who pay nothing. Where does the Government get the money to pay all these people? Answer: Taxes. Taxes on whom? It can't be taxes on the general populace, because they don't have any money, which is why you propose these things be free. So it must be taxes on the upper tiers, people who are working more than the baseline. They could settle for the free stuff, but they choose to work to earn more and get more.
But my objections are twofold.
1. It just doesn't seem fair. All these people that are rich and supposedly could share their wealth with the rest of us, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are billionaires, they didn't have to do the things that made them rich. They chose to work at the things that made them so. If instead they chose not to do those things, then they wouldn't be billionaires, and that would be two fewer people you could tax the dickens out of.
2. It just doesn't seem like it will all add up in the end, at least not forever. Even though there are lots of rich people, I don't think there are enough rich people to keep society going forever off their taxes. First of all you would have to tax them so hard that it would be demoralizing to them. And it would be demoralizing to others who also would consider doing something to become rich.
A dream I have that might work is that every able-bodied person is required to work, but the standard work week is halved. If I only had to work 20 hours a week at my day job, I would be ecstatic, and I think I would have enough time for my hobbies, art, open-source contributions, and other things that people are talking about benefit the rest of society, if only people were given a breath to work on them.
I still think 40 hours a week is pretty hard, especially when you consider that people who work only 40 hours a week don't work only 40 hours a week. Add in commutes, runs to the grocery store, chores, home repairs, and other the other work you must do, unpaid, it adds up easily to 50% more. And I have not even mentioned parenting.
If people could live comfortably working 10-20 hours at an official job (not counting the other work I mentioned), that would be paradise. I don't think I would even want to work 0 hours a week. I would start to go stir-crazy.
I don't see any good alternatives to having children take care of their parents. Abuse is common at even the most expensive nursing homes. You can't always blame the caretakers either because being constantly surrounded by grumpy, dying people has a huge psychological toll.
What? There is absolutely no excuse for elder abuse. Are you kidding with this?
Realistically? Probably better than 99% of people would play video games and watch TV their whole lives. Not everybody is oriented to be an artist/author, an inventor, a scientist, or some other creative type.
More people than you'd think, not saying they'd be good at it but they'd do more than play video games all the time. Nowadays you have people streaming, making podcasts, making tf2 hats, youtube videos, cosplay, fan-fiction, dancing, playing non-professional sports, graffiti, etc, etc.
The percentage of people who take full advantage of being freed from working to survive isn't terribly important; it's the number.
More people probably are naturally oriented in a way compatible with that (perhaps not to be commercially successful at it, but that's expressly not an issue) before they are aggressively socialized out of it by people who want to prepare them for the economic necessities of surviving in the world we actually live in, where indulging such an orientation without the particular combination of skill and luck needed for commercial success is often a recipe for misery.
I think you're confusing what you would like to happen with what is likely to happen.
Is it simply better public schools where they're doing poorly, or something else I am missing?
I'm curious, when you start getting into how to educate children in a way to have them fulfill their potential, how we measure whether or not we're succeeding. I definitely do not think we are (in the US). I also perceive a "will" to succeed, but everyone disagrees on how to make that reality, and I don't believe that this sort of list, while reasonable, does much to help in the way of solving the problem. I'm not saying it's a bad list or I disagree with it, it's just not prescriptive in terms of, "This is how you help children reach their full potential."
(And then we start getting into questions about what is full potential? If we're thinking in a short-sighted way, full potential is probably limited to their usefulness to the economic system balanced with their own relative mental health.)
People would probably go crazy from the boredom and start killing themselves. Work and struggle are good and inspire more creativity and inventiveness than doing nothing
Of course, today, suicide is less of a taboo, and indeed suicide rates are higher in richer neighborhoods, as one would expect: https://www.businessinsider.com/link-between-wealth-and-suic...
What exactly do you mean by that? State raising children? No families? That sounds dystopian to me.
They likely mean what is the more obvious assumption. We take taking care of all children as a serious problem and try to have certain benefits happen for all children. IE they shouldn’t be going hungry or not going to school.