If we were to live in a world where we are measured by our productivity, we would ALL be treated like the replaceable cogs from the Chinese factory.

If that’s frightening to you, I think you’re seeing the point.

Isn't that frightening to you? What makes you think you would not be living under the whip?

I think parent's point is: why do we think it is ok to treat some people this way and not others?

- Because the people that already found a way to display the scarcity of their talent or abilities don't need to subject themselves to a system that measures them by their productivity.

- Because it is not on "us" to try to change this at an universal scale. I am all for people that believe in communist ideals and go to live on their own with like-minded people. The problem is those that take this to totalitarianism and think something like "communism can only work if it everyone does it"

- Because history has witnessed already many people that tried to change this reality without ignoring scale, and ended up causing more problems that solutions, destroyed more wealth and made the world worse than they started off.

Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?

The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

> Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?

How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?

We can't even compare "productivity" in our own "profession", much less between different ones.

Fuck, even to think in terms of "professions" today seems so anachronistic... some of the best people I worked with were never trained, should we disregard them and go back to a world of credentialism and guilds?

> The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.

> How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?

How would you measure your scarcity? It is similarly difficult. "Workers are paid according to their productivity" does not mean "there is a fixed mechanical pay formula based on lines of code or something".

> More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.

If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area? Wouldn't "can be replaced by machines" be the literal minimum possible scarcity?

> If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area?

Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.

But, just look at what happened when Facebook decided to not pay SF salaries to those that moved out of the Bay Area. That was just Zuck saying "if you want be anywhere in the world to work here, then I can also look anywhere in the world to hire people", which instantly made them realize that they are not that scarce anymore.

> How would you measure your scarcity?

- My employer finds someone that can do my job for less money than I am asking, so they replace me. I am not as scarce as I thought.

- Some other company will offer more money to do the same job I am doing currently. I am more scarce than I thought.

- I work on new things, show experience or an ability that not everyone in the company can - let's say I am now able to manage a team of developers or I can work on both the backend and do devops. My scarcity increased.

It's not that hard.

> Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.

But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people. Whether that is possible is independent of how we determine compensation.

> It's not that hard.

You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post. This is an unfair comparison.

> But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people.

No. Entrepreneurs will bypass them anyway, whenever possible and whenever profitable. The difference is that your idea of "paying by productivity" would make cheap labour expensive, consequently increasing the profitability of automating work process and accelerating the pace of replacing labour.

> You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post.

No, I am being descriptive of the current reality. You want to be normative about your idealistic method. So, yes, you have the onus of coming up with a system that could replace the existing one and be at least as effective.

This is a poor take. Productivity is meaningless, leverage and impact is everything.

Tim Cook working for one day could easily have a larger impact than most people will have in their entire lives because he has extremely high leverage.

Is it fair? Absolutely not, but life is not fair. I don't understand what moral obligation society should have to base compensation on productivity.

PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.

> PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.

Of course. "Pay by productivity" does not mean "pay everybody the same per hour of labor". Cook's output has greater influence on the company than any (or perhaps almost any) other employee at Apple. He should be paid commensurate to that output.

Oh, how do you think of productivity then? (E.g stock price, revenue growth, etc?)

I assumed you meant something along the lines "pay everybody the same per hour of labor" since that seems to be how most people describe productivity.

The company produces some amount of economic output in a year. This can be stuff or it can be innovation. That is the total productivity of the company. The sum of all productivity of its employees adds up to that value. Right now, people are paid less than the value of their productivity so there is money leftover for the company to either stick in the bank (profit) or reinvest in other things.

Not everybody is equally productive. Somebody who has more skill or knowledge in a profession like software engineering will be considerably more productive than a less skilled engineer. Among leftist circles, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find people who describe productivity as literally just "number of hours worked".

What about companies that produce negative value (say, an oil company that caused an environmental disaster)? Are the workers going to return part of their salaries back?

How many software companies got off the ground, hired people, PAID SALARIES, yet never got to see themselves become profitable?

How many companies would not even have existed if there was no risk investment done?

Is that moral failing related to jealously about how others choose to spend money that isn't theirs?

Money is not gifted to people by God. It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses. The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history and can change.

> It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses

Exactly. And history is pretty clear that nearly everyone is worse off when society decides how to spend money instead of letting owners decide how to spend money. It's why every first world economy has a massive dose of capitalism and a tiny dose of socialism in their GDP. And why a significant part of the worst economies of the world don't.

>The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history

Yet the poor (and pretty much everybody else too) in most of the world, if not all, today are vastly richer than the poor of the past.... Maybe there's a reason the world has moved away from the economic systems of the past?

I'm from former USSR and I can hardly stand this commie foolishness. Go to some socialist country like Cuba, Venezuela that have eliminated the inequality (like the USSR did before), then talk about 'moral failings of the society'.

Go to some country like the United States, where we have nice things like weekends and 40-hour work weeks because we had a rather successful labor movement in the early 20th century because of discussions like this. We used to have children working in coal mines, and now we don't largely because people spoke out. Thank god for them.

I think that the conditions of workers impoved in some countries after WWI because of Russia: politicians and entrepreneurs looked at what happened in Russia and decided to make the proletariat a bit less unhappy, because the alternative looked very very very bad

Imagine a world where we didn't have to choose exclusively between dictatorial communism and unfettered capitalism.

So sad that any other system is completely impossible

Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth. But in case of foxconn workers and Cook, everything is fair. Foxconn workers are not chained to the benches, that simply don't know any other place where they can earn more. And I think Cook doesn't bribe anyone to achieve such payouts. If anything, he's doing a great job developing a business.

> Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth.

What is corruption?

A software engineer doing the same work gets paid way more in SF than in London. State policies prevent free movement of labor between London and SF. State policies do not prevent free movement of capital across nations, as clearly seen by the number of megacorporations actually owned by weird subsidiaries in strange locations for tax purposes.

Corruption is profiteering from occupying position of power, or from having ties with people in power. For example, getting a well paid job without necessary skills, because you are a nephew of a company vice president.

As for software engineers, recently so many people here are up in arms against the return to the office... But still want to get paid 3x the guy from Indonesia. I'm looking for them replaced with cheaper developers, and what they'll think then about the remote work.

The USSR was an authoritarian hellscape. Most states in history have been that way. I am not convinced that deregulated capitalism is the only way to achieve non-authoritarian rule.

At the end of it's life, USSR wasn't a hellscape. It was a land of bored disillusioned people who knew the futility of trying, because the outcome was always fixed