Modern society makes it look easy, but it's extremely challenging for a 'Dunbar's number' sized tribe to meet all its members' needs at anything resembling the quality of life we're all used to. The healthcare/pharmaceutical needs alone would be borderline impossible. You'd have to be willing to tolerate much lower life expectancy, much higher mortality for infants and mothers, etc. etc.
> The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society.
That much I agree with. I don't propose total self sufficiency. I just think that dishes is a very bad example of a job that wouldn't get done if we didn't pay someone to do it and, more constructively, that a lot of jobs fall into this category. There is an obvious incentive for me to wash my dishes: I want my dishes to be clean before I use them. No one has ever paid me to wash dishes. I've washed dishes for myself, for friends and for family.
Dishwashing is a good example of an ubiquitous chore that almost everyone does without any market incentive, which strikes me as the exact opposite of a job no one wants to do and which therefore has to be paid for.
Work that most people actually really don't want to do is usually well paid for this reason. If you'd said hyperbaric welding instead of dishwashing I might be more inclined to agree that it needs more of an incentive than the mere satisfaction of meaningful work.
> Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange
It should not be a surprise that money plays an important part in a society where the allocation of labor is governed by money and those that have it. It does not follow from this observation that there can't be other sources of incentives to innovate and produce.
It should also be mentioned in any discussion where the current state of production is touted as something we should aspire to that there are indications that the current mode and level of production is undustainable and harmful to the environment. It's perhaps something we should change, but the market evidently isn't creating effective incentives to do so.
> And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
There's an important difference between jobs no one wants to do and jobs not everyone wants to do.
People will not do tasks merely because it's "fair". Otherwise crime would have evaporated, life would be harmonious, and judges would be bored.
I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.
Because you recognize this and aren't completely inflexible, you don't. Some degree of self-organization for mutual convenience can be relied on in much larger groups of people than two. For example, I often hear of shift workers trading shifts.
Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?
Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?
The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.
And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.