The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not necessarily for money, but for other people.
I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.
Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.
That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"
That means capitalism.
The downsides are lack of agency in large efficient orgs and unearned profits from capital.
I don't know the answer, but I don't think UBI + charity++ is it.
>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.
Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?
One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any alternative that can be put into practice.
That means markets, not capitalism.
If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.
EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system
In broad strokes, I'm more capitalist than communist, so I don't really disagree with the whole "greed is good" thing. Where I part ways is the unstated - often, I suspect, un-recognized - premise that it's the only good. Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.
That's a good point. And makes me think of videogames analogy, particularly MMORPG.
In a typical MMO, you need to labor to earn money (known as "grinding") to buy all the stuff you'll need to make progress easier (and/or possible). But at any time, you can just stop, take time off, go explore the places you've been to (i.e. not containing enemies stronger than you can beat), or even just log out and leave your character be for a week. You lose nothing except time and perhaps your rank in some completely optional competition with other players. But your character won't go hungry, won't starve or freeze to death, won't be evicted for not paying taxes.
That illustrates the difference between money being useful, versus being necessary. And even if it's only useful and not necessary, that doesn't mean you won't be motivated to earn it - you will want more money if the things you can buy with it are interesting enough.
There are other kinds of value, too.
This seems like an easy explanation striped of nuance that really needs some data backing it. How is it different from resentment from people who earned it by working? Why is it unfulfilling - is it only because of comparison to others, or is it common even for UBI? Is it specific to feelings about income, but balanced out by easier life, or is it a significant decrease in satisfaction overall?
There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our families?” [2]
Open source
Science
Philosophy
Family
Personal development
Volunteering in community
You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all. That’s why many in NYC lamented when Amazon was not given tax breaks to come to our city. It’s almost as if we need Bezos’ company to organize ourselves an our time so we can get paid the money.
Society spends tons on fossil fuels and commuting and for what? To sit in a chair 30 miles away?
I haven't been conditioned, thanks.
Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They mostly get told what to do and they often don't even see the customer that benefits from the value they create. And the people with agency at the top get the vast majority of the profits.
The result is a society with a lot of inequality and poverty, and a mass of alienated consumers trying to purchase those things which are missing in their lives: narrative, stories which connect their consumption with humanity. Hand-made this, small batch that, experiences you can share with other people., the personal touches which weave a life into a broader more meaningful tapestry.
And raising children, of course. But that's somewhat bitter-sweet, knowing the world they're going out into, unless you have some assurance they're going to be among those with agency.
> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.
Emphasis added.
> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...
I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".
It does not follow that I think that's the way things ought to be. That's how I interpret the "better" in EGreg's comment, because this conversation is about how we can live a better lives, not how to maximize efficiency. But we can only talk about oughts in the context of what can be.
What I'd like - as I've mentioned in another comment here - is some kind of organizational technology which enables the same efficiencies as large orgs, but without the alienation of labour.
I was interested (from a distance) in "Holacracy" but it's hard to find information about how well it works in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
Also, FWIW, I'm hoping that automation frees up enough time to be able to support "consensus driven" governance, which is I suspect is theoretically optimal, but it's really expensive:
Have the labor classes of the U.S. seen any advancement in the last few decades? Are the advances the labor classes of other (US/India) even worthwhile given the lack of political bargaining power?
You economically depress local workers, and sell them on their freedoms and in then in the next breath you're politically oppressing foreign labor classes while selling them on their economic advances. Both are true, but you take the larger margin from both.
LiveJournal vs Wordpress
AOL vs The Web
Britannica vs Wikipedia
I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.
In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz
Google “Distributism”
AOL -> Web -> Google AMP etc.
Wikipedia has its editors and its petty squabbles, and worse, its ever increasing budgets (for what, exactly?) funded by guilt-based extortion from the masses, a bunch of parasites feeding on public contributions.
Once a hill has appeared from the bottom up, climbers crawl out of their holes, clamber up and try and steer from the top. And they usually succeed.
In the end, the number of actual jobs available is very limited, and it's not so illogical to call the act of making such money/labor exchange possible as "job creation".
Probably because the origin of the term is very political in nature.
I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right.
People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?