> to those who don't wish to work
> those who choose not to work at all
> the same for working and for doing nothing, that people choose the latter
You're making my point for me with the arbeit macht frei dog-whistles here. So let me be clear: if "work" is defined as "millions of white and blue collar professional lives before Covid, lives replete with Kafka-esque meaninglessness in the former group and actual, medieval misery in the latter", then what I am saying is:
1. Yes guy, exactly: people no longer wish to "work", by that definition.
2. This is a good and deeply hopeful thing.
A society that's serious about human flourishing will grapple with these questions on a deeper level than "what's the unemployment rate?" or "should Amazon be lauded for 'creating jobs?'" Covid has forced us to grapple with them.
The usual Cato Institute talking points all involve pointing at the poor and moralizing about how they don't want to work, but comments like yours hold less and less water as time passes, largely because of shit like Covid. The notion - your notion - that there's an enormous class of people out there who are nothing but shiftless layabouts who fundamentally want to leech off of the rest of us is a strawman. While I'm sure there's a parasite or two out there, human beings of every class find deep meaning in labor. But the labor has to be meaningful!! Or, at least, not soul-crushing or immiserating. (And let's not even get into the really fun side-claim I'd make that there are proportionally way more parasites at the top of the socioeconomic pile than the bottom.)
So: to the extent that anyone doesn't want to work, they don't want to work because the labor available to them is innovatively life-ruining and in most cases vastly underpaid. To want to work in such conditions when there are suddenly alternative choices, as you imply they should, is to be deeply ill. Actually insane. And more of a reflection of where your heart is than anything else.
The idea I get from the Cato echoing types is if you have a job you should beg and scrape and genuflect for your betters to thank them for their grace in employing you.
I think this meme accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. Companies contracted but demanded more work from their remaining employees. Feeling fortunate to be employed they increased individual output to cover for the reduced head count. Companies screwed over employees then shrugged their shoulders with the "it's the economy" refrain.
I think I first heard it from Yanis Varoufakis (https://youtu.be/YpOLHSzZ8jc). Watched as many interviews of him as I could find during those long days at the beginning and middle of the pandemic. He's an exceedingly sane person.
Things can definitely be more equitable than they are now, and should be if we truly want a meritocracy, but let's not get caught up in the delusion that society can exist without people doing shit jobs they don't like.
I believe the transition to post-scarcity will be gradual, that it will happen faster in some sectors of society than others, and that this process may take multiple generations to complete. This has been the case with every other major economic shift, why would it not be the case with post-scarcity?
If this is how the transition to post-scarcity occurs, societies will eventually hit a point at which many people still need to work to produce our economic output, but far fewer than currently do. How will our economic system handle that situation? The selling of labor is the primary mechanism by which we distribute resources, but if we get to a point where only 20% of the adult population are needed in the labor force then how do we distribute resources to the remaining 80%?
Now, where things get really interesting is that "needed in the labor force" is not a binary thing, either. What if there's a big slice of the population from whom we only need five hours of labor a week? And they coexist alongside another slice of the population from whom we need forty hours of labor a week?
Maybe we're already a few steps down this road.
Most jobs that people have now aren't strictly necessary. If everyone gave up their leisure time to do all of their own cooking and cleaning, a massive set of jobs would disappear overnight. If we all at local, another. And the list goes on. Effectively, what happens is, we invent new jobs that are based on want as opposed to need. It's easy to look at that picture and say 'there is so much unnecessary work that happens!' but really, that X% of the economy based on want is required for price discovery of the rest. That is what your last paragraph is touching on, how do we decide who does what and how much? In capitalism, the answer is price discovery, and for that to work, everyone has to participate in the market.
This is precisely what I'm getting at. We've built a system on the assumption of a forty-hour full-time work week, with a goal of minimizing unemployment and (recently) maximizing labor market participation. We did this because we need participation in the market for effective resource distribution.
What happens when our economy simply does not need that much labor to produce all the economic output we want? Do we force people to continue participating in the labor market in makework jobs just so that they can have access to resources? To what extent are we already doing this?
But logically it would seem that should be: Everyone still has to work, but a little less than hitherto.
Now the question becomes, how much less?
Overall I agree with you: I'm not naive, nor am I a utopianist. I'm fine with more equitable. But we're so entrenched in the status quo that it feels like you have to talk like a revolutionary to get even a shred of "a little more equitable".
Edit: wait though what's a "post-scarcity" economy, anyway, concretely? I've heard since I can remember that we grow enough food as a species to feed everyone (and yet we throw tons of food out) - is that not a decent marker of being post-scarcity? We seem to have enough wealth in the US to be in neverending proxy or non-proxy aggressive wars against various groups of poor and largely non-white people - that wealth, used slightly differently, has got to be some kind of dent in all sorts of scarcity, no? I'm not writing this to attack you whatsoever; I'm genuinely curious. Post-scarcity is a phrase I've heard smarter people than me utter every now and then, and it only just occurred to me that I've never actually figured out what it meant. (I'll Google it now of course but I'd love to hear your perspective all the same. Cheers.)
The reason it gets brought up is because the moment one person's needs or wants infringe on another's, there needs to be a way to decide who gets what. Generally, this is what people are talking about when they talk about various economic systems. You come up with different mechanics that use the distribution of goods to incentivize the production of more goods.
The only way we escape the economic games that need to be played, to keep people working and producing things society needs, is if we no longer need them to produce anything. Then you no longer need the incentives and feedback loops that tie consumption to production, and people are generally free to do whatever the hell they want.
The idea of post-scarcity brushes over that dark part of human nature, and assumes we can figure out how to cooperate, even absent antisocial misanthropes. In Star Trek, they have "figured it out", but the transition to post-scarcity is understandably only vaguely described.
Work, in general, is stupid. The entire concept of it is inane. My fantasy version of utopia is a peaceful, post-scarcity society where no one ever needs to work, and automatically gets a life of luxury simply because it's available and costs nothing. Many people will choose to fill their time with things that look a bit like what we now call work (if you tilt your head and squint just the right way). Many will devote their lives to the pursuit of furthering humankind's knowledge. Many will choose creative endeavors that in today's economy would be judged worthless. Many will focus on their families and enjoy their time with them. And yes, some will choose to sit around and do nothing all day but eat junk food and watch the utopian equivalent of TV all day.
And all that is not only ok, it's awesome! Obviously this is a fantasy world, and we can't live in it. But we should think more about that as a goal, and shape things as best we can. Let's stop creating bullshit jobs just for the sake of full employment, and figure out what really needs to be done, and what doesn't. There's so much wealth in the world that we could certainly find an alternative that could keep people housed, clothed, fed, and then some, if there isn't a job available for them.
Our current system is just based on personal greed and cynicism. If we don't evolve beyond it, I fear we won't last as a civilization (or possibly even as a species) for many more centuries.
Contrast with... "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." -- George Orwell.
Sadly, I think we're still closer to Mr Orwell's vision at this point in time, in spite of have more material comforts and resources available than at any point in history.
To get to your utopian vision, we'll need to permanently break free of our primate instincts. That's not going to be easy.
This reminded me of an old political cartoon I saw at the Abraham Lincoln museum: https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.04994/
It shows Lincoln with his (supposed) supporters and their requests, one of whom is depicted as saying, "I want a hotel established by government, where people that ain't inclined to work can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco."
Companies aren’t really complaining about a labour shortage. They’re complaining that no one wants to work for their ridiculously low pay while the board and CEOs sail around in their yachts.
"No one wants to work for poverty wages in my shitty restaurant!" Sucks bro, that's the market. Raise your wages.
"If I raise my wages I can't stay in business!" Sucks bro, that's the market. Make your restaurant less shitty and get more business. Innovate. This is just competition - we like a little competition in America. You're not against America, are you?
They're just as reactive / emotional as the liberals they decry for being emotional. I know that schadenfreude isn't a workable foundation for a political outlook, but watching these people become ever so slightly uncomfortable about their position in the world before we inevitably return to pre-Covid status quo ante is worth a good chuckle.
Sure it is, but who pays the price at the end?
an example is the inner city food deserts
It sounds like maybelsyrup has it right, and it's these business owners who are in for the rude awakening. There's a rootbeer stand near me that has a message on their menu saying, "if minimum wage is raised to $15, our prices will go up 10%." They charge $3.60 for a pretty good cheese burger. When I read that message, I sit there thinking that the owner is an idiot. At $4.00, the burger is still a better deal than McDonalds and $15/hr is a solid wage in this area.
Yes! I keep seeing stuff like this, and I think "wait a minute, you're telling me that you want to slightly raise the price of this great product or service, and in exchange, your employees will be paid a living wage, or get decent health insurance, or another half day off, or a vacation? Please take my fucking money."
I recall being in an all hands bi-weekly meeting on one Saturday, one of the sons stood up and addressed the entire small company:
"I called around and you know what, we pay about average for the industry. Maybe a little bit on the upper side of average. You know, I could raise my prices and maybe pay you all more, but then I would have less customers. and If I have less customers then I can't afford to pay as many of you."
He looked around with an expression that I felt like was almost contempt, but really wasn't The industry is pretty low margin and they got theirs to be very good with volume sales and very good efficiency in processes. He felt the pressure to execute their plans to expand into another, second facility while remaining profitable enough at the original to fund their plans for world domination.
Every day they had customers waiting in line for literally hours for their turn in a crappy, kind of gross facility that had been cobbled together by these DIYers over a number of years. Every day they turned away customers in droves.
I thought to myself: Old man, if you don't raise your prices, you are a priceless fool. If you can't hire enough people to handle your amazing, envy inducing volume, _and_ you have the gall to exclaim proudly that you pay a little bit better than average, then you are surely and rightfully doomed to this mediocrity until you hopefully die.
What he said next only confirmed my young ideations: "We only want the people who _want_ to work here, to work here. If you don't like working here, well you should go somewhere else."
Nowadays they are still in business. They had indeed increased their pay by over 40% in the next couple of years. They opened their second facility years later after more years of project extensions and overruns, just in time for a global pandemic to shutter their entire operation for months. I'm happy they saw the light and realized what you have to do to attract and keep quality skilled employees, but I am for more pleased to be their competitor.
Sure, but this has been happening for all of history, and the end result has been higher wages and lifting people out of poverty. We still have a long way to go, though, both locally and globally.
I just started watching Warrior, which is a TV series set in San Francisco in the 1870s. The Irish-Americans are pissed off that the fat-cat business owners have been importing much cheaper labor from China. Of course they forget that during the early periods of Irish immigration to the US, they were the ones undercutting the wages of the Anglo-Saxon incumbents. This has been the case for pretty much every wave of immigration that included a large component of low-skill workers.
This is in play all the way to modern times, without the need for immigration's effects, with the outsourcing and offshoring movements starting in the end of the last century, moving manufacturing to parts of the world with cheaper labor, and now just this year companies realizing they can employ remote knowledge workers (in the same country, even) for less than their current workforce.
This is just normal (for better or worse), and yet you act like it's an aberration that will cause the sky to fall.
We shouldn't subsidize unlivable business models with human misery.
If that (the closures) also result in misery (of the unemployment kind) that will also be a good thing. It will signal stongly that we depend on broken business models and need to update them.
What you want is a compromise that perpetuates substinence-level wages and working class people needing 2 jobs, for the benefit of keeping alive zombie businesses.
Like some other commenters, and many thousands more in the broader discourse, you're speaking from a position of "this is the way things are and they can't be changed, so there".
My main point isn't to argue for this or that particular policy. My main point is that the world can be different. People motivated to change it will find a way to do so. In matters like these, arguments for economic determinism are borderline defeatist.
Outsourcing has costs on it's own but it makes sense for America to artificially inflate those costs to maintain its consumer market. America eats the world and through doing so provides a lot of liquidity to the international market. Whether that is just or whether it should specifically be America is up for debate - but it does have the power for force others to play by its rules within certain limits.
Bare naked capitalism isn't so far off from an anarchic free-for-all with spiked clubs.
Not only that, but the social and political ramifications of having not only blue collar workers out of a job, but also the PMC class as well. You want a revolution? Cause that is how you get one.
The problem with the fed stimulus was the benefits too large corps.
You may be right about this. In fact I'd wager that you are. But the problem isn't that part of what you said; it's this:
> That's not how business or the economy works.
You're probably right about this too! The problem is that, in these conversations, we usually just stop here. Whereas more and more, I'm finding myself asking "can we citizens find ways for business or the economy to work in some other way, even just a little bit? Are we willing to just creatively try and answer some of this stuff?"
I think, if you just stop at "that's not how ___ works" without pushing things further, well, it feels like rolling over. The way "business and the economy worked" in the American South as recently as the 60's was that, if you had a certain skin color, you were relegated to a shitty part of, say, the restaurant, or you were prohibited from participating in the economy in any meaningful sense at all. But then some people asked "is there a way for things to work differently?" It's far from sunshine and gumdrops 55 years later but you can't be chucked out of a lunch counter for being black anymore.
Sure you could look at capital investment as a form of payroll, but it's going to heavily skew the numbers and now GDP is not a great way to estimate if we can afford to pay a livable wage simply by looking at GDP.
Your right, numbers don't show everything and yah just can't redistribute gdp in a communist sort of manner. But I do think one of the parents thinking exercises does indicate that wealth distribution is more of a problem in America than certain European nations.
Capitalism for all it's flaws is a great system to motivate work, wealth creation, and capital investment(as u mentioned).
In an alternative reality fairer system that can muster up a similar work ethic the average person would be better off and you'd have similar innovation potential but with different work ethic driving motivational mechanisms. But that's a improvable hypothetical to be fair. That's your point of contention right?
Congratulations, guys, you're well on your way to reinventing Marxian economics.
I am saying there are a dozen countries, including several that are extremely similar to the US, that not only have higher wages, and higher minimum wages, but also extensive paid family and vacation leave, universal healthcare and a wide range of quality of life metrics around or above what we see in the US.
Australia has both, and a smaller gdp/capita than the US. Happy to dive as deep as you like.
On both front, Australia still has effective unions with political representation, and thus corporate interests don’t always win. That’s the main difference with the US.
"The 5 largest companies in the US are all computer software/hardware.
Australia's largest company is in mining, and 4 of the next 5 are banks.
Australia really needs to join the modern world..." [1]
--
On top of this you haven't compared -
1. The quality of life difference between minimum wage workers in those countries 2. The quality of health care between these countries 3. Median house hold income (not everyone is on minimum wage) 4. Differences in taxes and "net" pay 5. The differences in the makeup of the economies and conditions of jobs
Honestly the factors are endless and I am not going to spend more time enumerating them all.
[1] https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1403627678528200704
You want to talk about quality of life difference between $7/hour and $23/hour ??? Sure where do you want to start?
Want to talk about quality of healthcare… the US will lose badly here (except in certain types of cancer). And skewed statistics because the US just refuses treatment to a bunch of folks which hides treatment/mortality rates.
You want to talk about median income 33k (us) vs 43k (au)?
Or back to the more pressing point: when you only have corporate lobbyists and no lobbyists for workers (unions) workers get skrewed across the board.
All I was saying is you can't use GDP as a gauge for how much money is available for payroll (as suggested by the grandparent). That is very dependent on the economy producing it.
And yes, Australia beats out the US on pretty much any metric you like (unless you are looking for corporate benefit, then the US will win out, it’s much better to be a capitalist in the US)
Because if they are in positive GDP then they are in an economic surplus… that’s what gdp is right? Else they are in a recession.
Neither of which matter to my point, because the pie is ALREADY big enough for a living wage for everyone.
China has the fastest growing and largest middle class (or middle income earners) in the world. They prove exactly the point I’m making. There will come a point in time where there are less people (%) living in poverty in China than in the US if you follow the current trend lines.
Also you are only kind of right with “you pay for healthcare”. It’s heavily subsidised… compared with the US.
No. Just... No, absolutely not. That's among the most factually incorrect statements I've seen anywhere online, let alone on HN. Why would you even write something like that; are you really so utterly ill-informed, or just plain lying?
As in: The US spend more on healthcare as a percentage of gdp.
But it pretends that capital efficiency between government spending is equal. As Australia shows: free hospitals for less per/capita(or gdp) spending than the US…
In the US I’ve used the hospital system once (minor treatment, no over night stay) my insurance paid $4000+ usd. In China I’ve used the hospital system for a fairly serious physical injury and was treated very quickly, couple hours and I paid ~$600 rmb.
What does "~$600 rmb" mean? That '$' character is usually called a dollar sign. Do you mean "about US$ 600, but in Renminbi"; or are you just using the dollar sign as a general currency sign, to say "about 600 Renminbi"?
Emphasising my point what does $150USD get you on an American hospital - maybe a Tylenol?
A world where China elevates itself to the US's level is one we should celebrate in the west as it means we need to suffer less ourselves.
Also, the world is well beyond being a zero sum game economically, most of the biggest economic drivers these days are "silly and irrelevant" things like Facebook, Banking and the service industry. All the world can be well off.
That myth has been disproven long ago. Achieving a high standard of living and level of education does not magically cause people to pour into the streets and protest against their authoritarian governments.
>A world where China elevates itself to the US's level is one we should celebrate in the west as it means we need to suffer less ourselves.
A world where Xi Jinping is in charge of the global economy is a world where fundamental dignity is stripped from anyone who isn't Han, white-collar, hyper-nationalistic and living on the East Coast of Mainland China.
Many nations in Asia are gearing up economically and militarily to make sure this cannot happen.
While a flip doesn't instantly switch it does cause an erosion of the stability of the government. An enlightened populace is less accepting of authoritarianism than an unenlightened one and the excess luxury time that wealth creates leads more of the populace to enlighten themselves.
Please read some Chinese history. You'll see the exact same level of brutality, imperialism and aggression shown by the European empires, from Rome to Britain.
Much of central and Western China was only conquered during the last 500 years (basically the same period as European colonialism). They too, experienced forced cultural assimilation and ill treatment. They didn't conquer the globe in the way the Europeans did, but equally they didn't have the naval technology to do so.
Now since Yuan, you’ve had Ming and Qing… neither of which were particularly aggressive outside of their borders… and Qing was of course the start of the Opium wars, where the colonial powers essentially raped china for all its resources.
With regard to your strange Naval quip. You should look up the Chinese treasure ship. (Ming dynasty)… predates the colonials naval power.
So which Chinese in particular would you like me to read about? Everything you said is factually incorrect. To a laughable degree. I recommend you watch Marco Polo on Netflix, it’d teach you something.
I’ve got a major in Chinese History. Maybe get one of those too and come back and we can chat?
Sorry, must have missed the meaning of the "even", so the more charitable reading didn't occur to me.
Nationalism is not the same as subjecting your surrounding neighbours, which is the implication that the OP was making.
I bet I can guess which group you think you belong to.
The US Government printing money is why used cars, washing machines, and hotels are getting more expensive, while other categories stay generally below historical levels?
Soon those benefits will be insufficient, due to inflation, if the government continues to print money, and the real wages of the existing wage earners who actually produce value for the good of society by working are eroded and redistributed to those who don't wish to work.
If it keeps up, soon we'll all be poor, nobody will earn a living wage, but at least it will be equitable!
Don't forget that printing money for stimulus checks is borrowing at greatest expense to the lowest wage earners in order to pay those who choose not to work at all
It's not some revealed flaw in capitalism that given short term wages that are the same for working and for doing nothing, that people choose the latter.