I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing?

Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.

> If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture!

We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live.

If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.

>the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.

Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy.

The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off.

https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY

That example is too simplistic.

The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances).

For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?

Wrong. It's not a football match. There's no upper limit. If some needs are fulfilled, new ones (that used to be unimportant) appear. No enough cars for everyone, you produce cars. If the demand is fulfilled, you produce personal planes, etc. ad infinitum. Wrist watches were once unaccessable and kind of unnecessary for the majority, too. Just like stockings and other things that were once considered luxurous. EVeryone will find their niche.

> last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid

The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".

Look I think “work to live not live to work” is a great philosophy, and one that probably makes for a fulfilling life. But virtually everything you take for granted about modern civilization only exists because of work-obsessed lunatics.

At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present.

I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.

A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).

Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits.

Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies.

Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.

But your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk… Your local pizza guy or startup founder, are those the people you call “meat robots”?

>Your local pizza guy or startup founder

Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop!

...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!

The pizza guy and the startup founder does have some things in common though: they live outside the comfy Swedish 9-to-5 mainstream, and could both be seen as “meat robots” I guess, if you are so inclined.

>> You know, it's [amoré]

FTFY

> your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk

Citation needed for the above.

Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.

Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.

Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.

Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.

I'd say that a fair economy should always reward those who decide to work more than average.

However, those people should not be able to use their extra earned money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.

Define "against the rest of us". The whole point of earning "extra" money is to be able to lay claim to scarce resources. Inevitably, outbidding someone for something will be felt as using the extra earned money against them. If you cannot outbid someone, then the extra money is worth nothing, and hence there is no reason to work more than average.

If you take my comment as a basic premise of a fair economy, then "outbidding" does not make any sense. In fact, it makes more sense to share scarce resources.

There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

> non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on

if they are non-scarce, then you already have obtained your required amount, and thus no longer demand more.

> buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

buying up assets, since assets would be scarce, allows you to demand payment for their use, and thus, ensure your future financial situation is secure.

It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people. And it gives those who don't own assets the motivation to work harder. The resulting society will then have more aggregate wealth than before.

> It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people.

It sounds like we can assign bandwidth to the highest bidder then. Who needs Net Neutrality?

Seriously, the problem with your thinking is that you're stuck with the idea that our current economy is the only and most fair way to divide resources.

The current economy already has marginal income/wealth taxes to divide resources in a more “fair” way. Obviously they can and should be tweaked as changing parameters call for it to be tweaked in order to achieve whatever goals society is working for (such as a floor on standard of living).

This is true, but one problem is that in our current system fairness is always secondary. Something we tweak for when things go askew. A more ideal economy would flip this around, to ensure we don't allow some people to spoil it for others. And certainly not a minority spoiling it for the majority, as is the case all too often. The law simply can't keep up with the evil business schemes cooked up by a rich and greedy minority.

No, the scarcest resource is human time. If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources. Him doing that trade doesn't reduce the number of human work hours available to others, instead he increased the value of the pool since now there is more diversity of jobs the pool is capable of performing.

Your assumption here is that you can trade human work hours for finite natural resources on some market, and that everyone has to pay for those resources on the market. There is nor reason why you should be able to do that, rather the natural system is to allocate all finite resources equally to each person and then you an pay for those with your work, but you working harder to pay a person to share his resources with you wouldn't affect anyone else in the economy unless they too wants to have extra of that resource.

> If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources.

What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor? What if more people want 1 hour of a certain type of labor that exceeds the supply of that certain type of labor?

> What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor?

Doesn't have to be hours, the hour was just to represent that it is a human working and not a finite resource. Different human work can be valued differently.

That wasn't at all clear (and you seemed to me to be suggesting exactly the opposite) in your comment upthread.

That motivation to work harder breaks down the moment it becomes common belief that the amount of additional hard work required to secure such assets is unrealistic for the average person.

> An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

The fact that it is expensive is what defines it as scare (i.e. lots of demand relative to little supply).

How about using a less fuel efficient vehicle? Is that “against others” as it uses up the non polluted portion of the environment?

> An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the world’s desirable land?

> Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the worlds desirable land?

If you want better than median living conditions then you work for it. There is no reason why it should be free to live in the best parts of the world if not everyone can, otherwise the privilege of living there would be a source of injustice.

Who decides what is median living conditions and how is that decided?

The conditions that are left when those above median have chosen theirs. If you want better you work for it. If you don't want better then you share the work those who worked for theirs produced. So you work just as much as you want, and others working more means those who don't have more.

It is true that if you want a luxury resource, like a very attractive location to live in, then others working more for that position means you also would have to work harder if you want to have it. But I don't consider people competing for luxury resources a problem, no that is a feature and is what makes the economy tick. If you don't want that rat race you have to live in median conditions.

>There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

>An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

Why are expensive cars not scarce? They're ultimately built using scarce resources (eg. steel, rubber, plastic, labor).

Expensive cars are just as much a scarce resource as everything else is.

What would reward be useful for if not to trade it for scarce goods? Literally there are only so many miles of coastline, so many front-row tickets to the Super Bowl, so many square feet of land within a 5 minute walk of any given place on Earth, etc.

At some point, that reward is going to be traded for something else that's in demand and where the demand exceeds the supply. If you interpret that as "use their extra earned money against the rest of us", then it seems that you are going to have to disallow the notion of rewarding those who decide to work more than average.

Although it's working an unhealthy amount and it pulls everyone else to do the same, perhaps not ?

/deleted

> But who influences regulation and legislation?

The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse.

So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.

> So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy.

Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.

Scandinavian countries have quite a lot of transparency and it works fairly well. I agree that humans are pretty corrupt but it can be mitigated in a lot of ways. I live in Scandinavia and yes, our politicians are corrupt as well but the systems and how people vote incentivise them to do the right thing most of the time.

Success.

Mots people work hard because they want to succeed, not because they want to get rich.

You never become a great athlete for the money, you become a great athlete because you want to win. You never start a business for the money, you go $BIG_CORP if you want money, you start a business because what you want is success.

In 90 years the western world has never been as inegalitarian as today, do you think people in the sixties didn't create anything?

If capital gains rates were a lot higher than they are now, we would never have such innovative companies as Apple and Microsoft.

I thought most of the innovations those companies use were done by others, and what these companies are really good at is packaging things to make them appealing to the consumer?

What happened to the Microsoft hate that used to be on this forum?

Calling Microsoft innovative is a little... off, right?

Poe's law strikes again.

Your criticism is too simplistic. The fact that you stop working once you reach the cap is actually the point of the cap.