Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...

What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.

Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.

We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.

I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.

I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.

I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.

Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.

This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.

Thats your opinion, but it's not something that can be assumed to be true. Its equally likely that you just don't have the education and experience to perceive their contributions as valuable. Lots of people say the same thing about professions they don't respect such as artists, educators, police officers, mental health professionals, dog walkers etcetera. It says more about the person holding the opinion than the profession itself.

This is a common dodge used by professions that don't want to admit how much of what they do is not making any net contribution to society.

It is true that hedge funds contribute to making stock and bond trading markets more efficient, and that is a genuine net contribution.

It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades. Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.

The question for society as a whole, as with any profession whose genuine contributions have not so nice side effects (which is just about any profession), is whether the genuine contributions are worth the not so nice side effects. One way society as a whole expresses its judgments about such questions is social approval or disapproval of particular professions based on people's estimate of the tradeoffs.

People's estimate of the value of a particular profession is dependent on their understanding of the profession and how it provides services to other people/professions. However familiarity/understanding is not a prerequisite to expression of social sanction.

> It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades.

There's an agent-principal problem here where a trader managing other people's money necessarily understands more about the field than the person whose money they are responsible for.

> Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.

This is probably a sign that entry into this field is artificially limited. When the market rewards people for activity, it is supposed to indicate that activity is in demand. It may be the case that there are structural limitations that prevent the entry of new firms who would then drive profits to the marginal level.

In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.

This isn’t rocket science.

Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.

> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.

Iceland is 81.8% and South Africa is 41.7%, according to the table on the page.

Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread?

There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.

My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

Its more than comfort, agricultural productivity relies on modern technology. Storage and transport of food relies on modern technology. Modern technology is a society-wide endeavor where many people contribute in tiny ways that all add up to something that can't be replaced by any of them.

> My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Indeed, labor employment to population ratios range between ~40% and ~80% nowadays.

> Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

I think the issue is different than you are characterizing it. Why would a few people work to support everyone else without getting anything in return?