Even if you want to allege that the proverbial pie will become infinitely large, any one person’s slice is finite. However big my neighbor’s slice might be, I can strive to make mine even bigger.
I agree with you on principle, but I don't think it's straightforward as your point states.
A few people
But that is a good thing.
That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...
A pair of Nike jordans or air maxes is often in the ~120 range and made of far inferior materials.
Boots have never been cheaper/accessible before. The people that bring up repairable shoes don’t wear them or buy from shit brands like Thursday, doc martins, or timberland. You deserve your poor quality footwear.
Some old stuff is now cheap: Grain, oils, clothes, steel, heating, electricity and books, for example.
And now you need a vehicle which with its yearly costs adds up to the price of the land in the first place, because there are no trains, you can't ride horses on the highway and you don't have neighbors that are selling/trading what you need.
Living quarters, transportation, healthcare, food. What were theses figures in 1926, and how much work is needed to achieve them.
Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.
We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.
So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?
That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.
Yeah I know many people who do in the small town I live in. Mostly elderly who are used to it still, but also some young people who want to work just enough to buy what they need and not 1 minute more. I could've retired at <20 if I would've enjoyed that. Now I enjoy it more; it's kind of relaxing that kind of lifestyle; not because of not working but because of needing nothing outside your humble possessions.
Given actual alternatives, workers have made their preferences clear.
Culture also plays a part - America is uniquely mercantile and business first. Workers and citizens in other countries have made different choices.
People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.
If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.
Of all the Scandinavian countries, only Norway has any oil resources of significance.
The Scandinavian welfare model is primarily tax-funded.
It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.
The Scandinavian social programs are funded by high taxation. It is mostly a result of political prioritization, and not a windfall of natural resources.
The racist moral panic over "welfare queens" seems to be a counter example.
Expect a real movement to reduce the number of citizens in this country. Specifically, if you can’t trace your lineage to a founding father (including for kids of Geman or iish immigrants), than they want you disenfranchised.
Heritage Americans vs “hyphenated Americans”
I'm not the ownership class, this is unfair. You are the ownership class. People with money or who grew up with money are overwhelmingly left leaning.
And who exactly do you think controls these items?
The right wing here are the only people where I live with an actual viable plan for helping working people, even low class working people. The left makes deliberate choices that everyone knows will make things worse for lower class working people.
Even if we assume there are tons of jobless immigrants being ‘imported’ they would be renters, not buyers.
Generally, house pricing is primarily a supply problem. Removing immigrants will make this worse given that they are 30%+ of the construction workforce.
Immigrants are also overwhelming much more of a burden to society and the state, they are over represented in crime sadistically and take much more from the state that they contribute.
Suggesting that we would have no construction if we did not import criminal tax leeches seems like an evidence free statement.
This is complete nonsense. Immigrants use less social services than the average American. Here's the not remotely liberal Cato institute: https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-still-use-much-less-wel...
"There is a persistent myth that the United States lacks an extensive welfare state, despite all the evidence to the contrary. One look at this brief will disabuse you of any such belief. Total spending on means-tested welfare and entitlement programs climbed to about $3.4 trillion in 2023. About $823 billion went to means-tested programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, TANF, and refundable tax credits, while approximately $2.3 trillion was spent on old-age entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Native-born Americans use an average of $7,134 in old age entitlements and $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used $4,864 in old age entitlements and $3,370 in means-tested benefits. If native-born Americans had consumed the same per capita dollar amount of means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits as all immigrants, the total expenditures on these programs would have been about $715 billion less in 2023. That’s a tremendous savings, even for the federal government, considering it is approximately 42 percent of the federal budget deficit in 2023. We are tempted to suggest that native-born Americans should start assimilating toward immigrant levels of welfare and entitlement consumption.
Across nearly all major welfare and entitlement programs, immigrants consume less per capita than native-born Americans, but not uniformly so. They use much less Social Security and Medicare, but only slightly less Medicaid. Immigrants also use SNAP, SSI, and TANF at lower rates and lower dollar amounts per person, but those programs are relatively small compared to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Immigrants receive more per capita through the relatively small Earned Income Tax Credit and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. For the latter, immigrants use $3 more per year on a per capita basis than native-born Americans. Immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to use any welfare program and, when they do, use fewer of them for a shorter period. The typical lifetime abuser of welfare was born in this country."
The floor being three square meals and a roof would be a vast improvement compared to now.
I'm just some dude on the internet, so my opinions are worth exactly what you're paying for them (nothing). But when I try to understand this type of thinking, this is what I come up with:
In the old days of scarce resources (vast majority of civilization), children were expected to 'repay' their elders for the care they received by taking care of them in their old age. And the competition for resources made this idea of keeping those resources for your family only important for survival.
But with the resources available today, the dynamics a very different. Currently only about 25% of total employment is in agriculture, worldwide. In the rich countries this is very significantly less. Canada is 1%, USA is 2% [worldbank]
But we're living with the cultural baggage of generations of scarcity and tribalism, which still shape our policy in a time of incredible resources provided by technology. So instead of more sharing, we choose higher standard of living for ourselves. I know it will take time to change this culturally - generations - but I'm still disappointed it's not happening faster.
[worldbank]:https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:
I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.
I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.
If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.
Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale. The only reason such a limited scale commune might work is that you could rule with an iron fist and vote people off the island who start to take advantage of others and no longer pull their own weight.
I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.
But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.
This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'
There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
Many of these countries are going through the start of a lot of social upheaval in part due to these tax loads paying for social benefits that are simply not sustainable from a demographic perspective. There is an undercurrent of resentment for those who work non-enjoyable jobs and look at others who have it easier than them. This is from the blue collar/menial labor camp vs. the white collar/laptop classes who imo are totally and entirely out of touch with reality at this point.
> Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
While there is a little bit of truth to this, I don't really believe this is truly the case. Folks compare themselves to those around them, and socially speaking those you are in contact with are what generally matters from a societal standpoint. It's sort of like shoplifting. Sure, it's not "worth it" for any single retail clerk to take the personal risk to tackle a shoplifter vs. just watch it happen. But it's corrosive to society as a whole when that retail working a job they likely do not get much enjoyment out of is forced to simply stand by and watch someone just ignore the social contract and get ahead the easy/illegal way. So there is definitely truth to the trope of "don't defend a billion dollar corporation while being paid retail wages" - at scale it's incredibly damaging to society as a whole.
Same goes for living with folks on my block growing up who decided to take the easy route and loaf off the backs of others. In the end it's labor. You could redistribute the top 10% of wealth but you'd still have the same (or even more!) labor that would need to be done. Someone has to do it. Many kids growing up in that environment saw that and decided to not even put the effort in. Those who somehow rose above it almost universally escaped the poverty cycle.
I am not against taxing the rich more - but I'd argue that the systemic reasons why the top 10% or whatever control over 50% of the wealth of the nation need to be corrected before anything else matters. You can't really fix that with post-redstribution in my opinion. It needs to be fixed at the point of value creation so workers can somehow capture more of their labor surplus. Everything I've seen in life does not point towards "redistribute the rewards evenly regardless of personal effort or sacrifice put in" being a sustainable answer. This doesn't even work on a small scale in small companies - if management allows "lazy" workers to exist for very long, it becomes corrosive to the entire culture of the company and you eventually fall apart as those putting the effort in either stop or move on to greener pastures where they are not dragging others along via their efforts. Same goes with society.
> but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
This we can certainly agree on. Although I'll point out that the average HN poster is in this class of people.
Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.
To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.
They will hoard the resources, land, anything that is needed for people to stay alive.
Surely the problem with that is the billionaires, not the world of abundance though?
There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.
A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.
Issue is that virtually no company offers that deal unless you already have noteriety or money at the level of retiring anyway.
I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
I inherited some money and don't need to work, but do work on stuff because I like doing it. I imagine that's what things will be like post agi.
It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution.
Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.
However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.
Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.