> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
> and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem.
As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
Housing is a problem and not surprisingly a very big problem in all the English speaking countries the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, the scarcity of starter homes, high cost, low pay, and a epidemic of those so-called luxury apartments being built everywhere.
Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
Sure, if one ignores constraints then we can do everything. It's like saying that you could find an element in an unsorted array in O(1) if you just pick the right index. Obviously. The part that makes it hard is that you can't pick the right index. Coordination and resource allocation is everything. It's not free. It costs effort just like searching an unsorted array is O(n) worst case. There's no way to not pay the price. Energy has to be expended.
You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
You would not end up in the same place because then you'd be in a world without billionaires, so you would not have people who can too easily just buy every politician and law they wish for their own perpetuation.
It's not the ~50 billionares I'm worried about. They are human. You can appeal to Bill Gate's desire to leave a legacy he's proud of. You can appeal to Elon Musk's desire for technological progress.
What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.
My observation is that if we leave our recognition up to people with power, they will choose to keep it for themselves or give it to their friends a majority of the time and that seems fucked up to continue to allow in a just society
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
I'll always liked this idea until trying to map it out myself, and always running aground, preferring performance bonuses instead.
You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.
Reminder that in the USA the Republicans have had an intentional policy of introducing these sorts of issues into the system. They call it 'starve the beast' and the goal is to delegitimize government/undermine it's financial stability completely so that they can push their agendas.
For 40 years, half the government (the Republicans) have been trying to break things/damage things/induce huge debt loads/underfund programs so they can't succeed.
Look at what Republicans has done to governance/oversite Inspectors General offices this current term. They have removed their ability to be neutral observers/oversite. Republicans do not care about fighting any of the things you listed, and in fact have been encouraging them for 40 years hoping by making things worse they can finally win on their argument 'government doesn't work' leaving out 'because we've have actively worked to break it for 40 years'.
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.
I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
Reminder it has been the intentional policy of the Republican party since the 1980s to 'starve the beast'. That policy includes pushing tax cut after tax cut in order to run up debt to weaking the government/it's ability to fund programs, and then make claims just as OP has.
The rich have our money. The money given to them via irresponsible tax cuts for the last 40 years in an intentional policy to fiscally damage the government so much it fails.
You keep posting this brain-dead line in these threads, without any numbers or evidence to support it. It's like you're just copy-pasting without reading the comments you're replying to.
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
Switzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.
Norway is kind of the same, but they made a decision to set up the Norwegian sovereign fund to save and invest that North Sea oil money their counterparts however on the other side of the North Sea, Great Britain decided to spend like a drunken sailors most of the money ended up mostly in the hands of the upper crust of the country. if a country is wealthy and unselfish enough, they can make provisions for society in general.
What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of that rule.
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
“If you can afford it” is not efficient. It’s merely priority queue vs FIFO wherein it is decided that some folks get to skip lines based on some arbitrary merit.
If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
Are you getting faster or better outcomes in America than when taking _private_ treatment in Canada, or do you need the treatment in Canada to he public for your claim to hold?
I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
The US has (without much debate) the absolute best healthcare on Earth if money isn't an issue. There are so many more experts in so many more fields with access to so much more cutting edge technology that...well rich people travel to the US to get care.
I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem.
"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
you are a funny man. i live in the one of the wealthiest areas of the US, c with good healthcare: specialists are very hard to get. service rationing is everywhere. we are losing doctors.
your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
Interest and military and take a distant third and fourth place respectively. Here are the rough proportions of the top US federal budget expenditures according to the Treasury Department:
- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%
- Social Security: 23%
- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%
- National Defense: 13%
And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services.
The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
I agree with the system you describe, i tend to disagree with the conclusion.
I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.
Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.
My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.
One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.
Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded.
either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth.
land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)
What you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like.
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.
While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between.
People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS
> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors
it's not a ponzi scheme either. in a ponzi scheme the top of the funnel gets rich off the funds of new investors who are expecting a return. my taxes are not an investment secretly used to make some people rich by fooling newcomers, they're explicitly directly funding the current beneficiaries.
While that is true, the problem is they have raised the age required to receive benefits in the past and they likely will do it again. Many people will die off before they receive the benefits. The system is also probably going to go insolvent in the early 2030s and the benefits will be cut by over 20%.
Many young people feel like they are going to pay into SS for 50 years to pay for the older generations and then when they retire they are going to receive less than they paid in. Obviously that may or may not be the case, but there is a general feeling that they are being gypped in order to pay for the older generation's retirement that they will not get themselves.
What a great collection of incorrect right wing talking points!
Look up when benefits began to be paid. The current payments very much and by design pay for the current retirees. The idea that this is some kind of elaborate “scam” when it is one of those things that every other civilized country has figured out is hilarious. Go travel. Go talk to some retirees there. Turn off the Fox News.
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go.
If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you.
The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others.
Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity.
We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
Because one's value to society doesn't determine their wage (an economic matter) or status (a social matter). The parent comment is right. What you've pointed out is a separate "injustice" of a kind: that we generally under-appreciate others.
> then your worth is very much linked to your productivity
Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious…
The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck..
> the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more
Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions.
It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15).
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
thanks a lot for the clarification and effort for it.
Maybe the other reactions made it generally more unclear, but was unsure about the core message.
This is much more clear and direct, and yes I was believing you meant something in that direction.
Regarding the other comment, thanks also, I understand that feeling the moment of having to ask something like that, but I think that if fought with enough pragmacity I think I would try to overcome the psychological part because the need would overcome the shame, and that would overcome the situation. or that is not feasible in that case?
I'm sure it's feasible, but it's treating the symptom rather than the disease. I'd rather people never get to the point of having to call a friend because they can't afford food today than them not feeling shame when it does happen.
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
> If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I'm using the word differently to you. It's productive insofar as you enjoy doing it.
Just to make a point, have these two definitions from Wiktionary:
> Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
Capable of producing enjoyment, yup. I'd call playing Candy Crush productive if enjoyment is your goal.
> Yielding good or useful results
The good result here is, again, the enjoyment of whatever. If you enjoy playing Candy Crush, then playing it gives you a good or useful result, namely the enjoyment of playing it.
> I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
If someone truly finds Candy Crush enjoyable to the point they do it everyday or whatever, and we're not talking addiction (so they're not actually enjoying it, but rather feel compelled to do it), then more power to them. I wish my desires were so simple.
And yet, you seemed to have been using it the way the rest of us are in this discussion, right here:
You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I think the issue here is that everyone else is having a discussion about economics, how we efficiently allocate scarce resources as a society, and the role that individual productivity plays in that allocation. You're having a discussion about enjoying your life. Which is great, if you want to play Candy Crush all day and call it "productive" because that makes you feel better, go for it.
But I'm not interested in paying your bills so you can.
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh
but that's more of a personal values discussion
> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
Agree completely. Its hard to tease out what percent is a cheating response due to increasing accommodations and actual pathologizing.
Some personal observations, I would say about 90%+ of "emotional support dogs" are fake. And I can't remember the last time I saw someone that was actually disabled use a disabled parking spot. They always have the proper license plate or mirror tag, but every time I've seen someone enter their vehicle it would appear that they do not need special accommodations afforded by the preferred parking spot.
I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt.
Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful.
I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.
Most Catholics also don’t believe in double predestination and think that (more or less but that’s the gist) god has pre-picked people who are destined to be successful and those which are destined to be lazy and worthless or even outright evil. That’s one of the core tenets of Calvinism and similar religions.
Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?
As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true
you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?
Yes, it is more productive. Becoming more familiar with the English language and skillfully written prose is good. The notion that modern prose is of lesser quality is widespread.
I think you missed my point. But you think the bounds of every field of research and technology has expanded, except language?
To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that.
I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive.
There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
> Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?
No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
not every profession has excess, not sure I can get on board with the idea that candy crush is of equal value to any job. money is just a measure of goods and services.
I am not from the US, so this "protestant work ethics" sound foreign to me. And to be honest, very harmful.
Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard.
Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well
I was raised as a Buddhist and in Buddhism it says that the biggest wealth you can have in your life is good health. Most of us take it for granted, that how lucky we are to born without a disability and can function doing daily tasks like taking a shower, going to the toilet without the help of someone else. I cannot imagine how difficult life would be with a disability and even thinking about it makes me anxious
I always try and remember that the majority of the creatures of this planet do not have the luxury to live in an environment where they can freely choose to shield themselves from bad weather and regulate temperature of their surroundings to their convenience.
I've spent 6 weeks on wheelchair and few more months on crutches after a nasty paragliding accident. The concept of just standing upright and walking straight, that we take for granted as much as 2+2=4, was suddenly impossible, and after getting it eventually back through extensive physiotherapy its something I cherish to this day. The freedom it grants is unimaginable unless one was robbed of it. Simply reaching on higher shelves to get some food became impossible without help.
Bad things have often silver lining if one is looking with right kind of eye.
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.
This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.
Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.
It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.
How do you figure? It seems trivially relevant to asserting that family has only mattered for 200 years.
I suspect you're actually talking about the current western/american conception of family (fair!) but it doesn't make sense to ignore this obvious miscommunication.
To be fair (and I’m certainly not saying its not a good movie) Odyssey has very little to do with the original story or the worldviews and values described by Homer if anything at all. It’s a modern fantasy movie (i.e. the characters world views are mostly modern) loosely inspired by the Odyssey.
There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.
Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.
The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.
e.g.
The claim:
Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say:
I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
I understood your point. You did nothing wrong, the person replying to you read too much offense into what you wrote. They're looking for a fight. Ignore them.
All the time? HN attracts some ... interesting ... characters so I accept it as something that has likely happened at some point, but something common? Anecdotes aren't shared in some kind of weird effort to falsify an imagined mathematical proof. They are shared because that is the natural progression of a discussion.
More commonly we see things like,
A: "I went to work today"
B: "One time I was on my way to work but I slipped on the ice in my driveway and ended up in the ER with a broken leg instead"
A: "Your broken leg does not disprove that I went to work today..."
Where A is trying to relive their glory days on Reddit where such a retort would have been considered funny, but thankfully most HN accounts know better than to think that is still funny, or that it was ever considered funny on HN. This thread being illustrative of one such exception, of course.
Why would someone take time out of their day to contradict or narrow someone else's so-called argument? Nobody cares about your argument. Anecdotes are shared because someone found an anecdote, that came to mind based on previous discussion, to be interesting. Sometimes that interest isn't shared and the thread dies there, but other times others do find interest in it and discussion continues. That's the nature of discussion.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
> Everytime you meet someone new and they ask “What do you do?” they’re not asking about your passions, hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time; but how you make money, how you turn yourself into income.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
I've found I ask that question often, but for me it's because I'm interested in learning about new stuff, so if they work with something I'm not familiar with I'd find it interesting to talk about that.
However if I sense they're just in it for the paycheck then I try to ask about hobbies or similar.
The first question when you meet someone is often to measure your status.
In New Zealand, different cities had different questions. Auckland: where do you live (using suburb as a proxy for status), Christchurch: what school did you go to (status used to be highly linked to your high school), Wellington: what do you do (a lot of people move to Wellington to work and it has a very wide variety of professional and government jobs).
It depends somewhat on context since often status is implied by the situation you've met someone. I've even had people straight up ask: how much do you earn.
> I’m 38 years old and I just had to ask my mom if I could borrow money [...] potentially spending the next 50 years without stable income
Without stable income it might be more like 20 years. (I wish you personally a long and bountiful life!)
I'm in a similar boat. As a 3rd child in a somewhat poor family, I do not have any inheritance and actually need to help my mom financially (though it's not a burden). My wife is also from a rural area and her inheritance is barely worth 5 (hypothetical) figures. We never got or will get anything given to us for free. We are in our 40s and we completely gave up on having children (though it was not overall a financially-motivated choice) or property (this one certainly is). Live day to day while I can work, and die without regrets when I cannot anymore. Thanks to AI that happens probably sooner than later.
It's more of a resignation I think? An overwhelming majority of people (on Earth, I don't mean the highly skewed US/EU citizens) are one accident away from total ruin. I don't stress about it but I also recognize how broken we are still, as society.
The idea that "hard work, discipline, frugality" are Calvinist and Protestant inventions may be the most preposterous thing I've read today. As if the rest of the world or previous eras valued self-indulgence and wasteful lavishness.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
It's mere slander. It reminds me of the Smithsonian's insistence that punctuality, hard work, objectivity, and politeness were aspects of "white dominant culture" and "white supremacy".
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
Agreed. I believe the special sauce Calvinism added was equating those values with moral success/failure, and therefore spiritual salvation. It gave "not working hard enough" an eternal consequence. It may not have been the first, but Calvinism certainly made it mainstream in the west. See also: how frequently critiques of the poor slide into moral judgements.
It's simple, what is written here should be part of basic education for every human being/worker.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you!
And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
Fortunately, just about all of those are the result of slow poisoning via industrialized food sources. And can be remedied via diet. It's not fun wanting chili fries and having to eat eggs and home-made yogurt instead. But it's working in my case and I have the labs to prove it.
If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD).
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
Worker's compensation is similar, and that actually is mandatory for employers to offer in most US states. But IIUC, that's only for injuries that are caused by your job in some way?
I've looked into these kinds of policies a couple of times now, and the premia are just astronomical. (At least from the quotes I've been given).
It's kind of understandable, given that the risk is not all that low. But my guess would be that it's amplified by fraudulent claims in relation to psychological illness, burnout, etc. I asked my insurance guy to exclude those, but, apparently, it's something he can't do.
You can kind of see, how this works for a roofer: If you hurt your leg and can no longer climb a roof, the policy pays. What does it take for me to no longer be able to sit in front of a screen? Well, it would almost have to be something in the psychological realm. Sure, there's the possibility of an illness with chronic pain or cognitive impairment, but those are orders of magnitude less likely, so the psychological stuff is what completely dominates the high premia.
don't forget the legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer making the LTD insurance actually pay and a second legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer suing the primary LCI as they will likely claim that case isn't covered by their policy.
Bingo. And remember, these lawsuits to establish the magnitude of the payout/severity of the injury: you'll be going through them shortly after sustaining a disabling injury.
Except mental health conditions in these plans seem limited to 2 years. For all the talk of mental health is health, this seems to run directly counter to that.
> Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue.
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.
No, Weber is not the current state-of-the-art, but you can see how was a bit suspicious (given the evidence that Weber was working with) that the Reformation and the first meaningful economic growth possibly ever (the "Great Divergence") in history seem to have started at approximately the same time and in the same places (England, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, Holland).
We now have scholarship based on earlier evidence (it turns out that availability of the printing press massively increased the surviving sources we have about "early modern" Europe versus the earlier manuscript-driven ages, so our sources have a distinct bias toward the post-Gutenberg world -- and the printing press itself is probably a major node in the web of causes and effects that drive this transition!) and AIUI the best current guess is that the Black Death is what initially kickstarted economic growth (the "Little Divergence"), possibly by effectively ending serfdom in those places as agricultural labor become much dearer than before the plague. The Reformation, under this view of things, is more of a consequence of economic growth -- the ranks of increasingly numerous rich-and-influential commoners and burghers asserting their place in a social order defined by the Roman church -- rather than a cause of it.
Considering Weber was publishing give or take a century ago, it not being state of the art isn't surprising. It's still influential because it established a lot of the tools used by modern sociologists, as well as providing a counterpoint to Marxist thought. Personally I'm mostly indifferent to the claim.
You're also misreading the claim, the Protestant work ethic is not claiming any virtue on anyone's behalf. Weber's claim is making a casual connection between the development of capitalism and religious covenant. It's certainly not the prescriptive theory you're making it out to be.
Well of course Weber isn't exactly state-of-the-art sociology, but when people say "the Protestant work ethic" that is basically one widely-accepted name (a pointer if you will) to an idea that sociologists have long recognized is present in some segments of many societies.
I'm under the impression the phrase was used because lay Catholics had more days off work since they wouldn't work on Holy Days. Protestants had significantly less Holy Days to the point where some denominations only avoided working on Sundays. Protestants used this phrase as an insult against Catholics for having more days off work. It had nothing to do with freeloading.
I've felt worthless for a long time. Sucked at school, suck at university, jobless. But something about the things I do has given me comfort. Trying to make music, trying to draw. And just doing the things another version of me would look at and think "that's nice"
I've also been a social outcast for a while now. But putting my creative works out there makes me feel like I'm building the tools to appreciate myself and be appreciated by others. And knowing I can be appreciated, even if I'm not, is enough to give me a sense of self worth.
Reframing the thing you’re doing as “trying to do the thing” struck me as something kinda powerful. You’ve got to suck at something before you don’t.
I’ve found that if I start something new, say learning to carve wood, I might compare myself to others in an unhealthy way, not improve as fast as I want to, or something else, and sorta psych myself out of it. I wonder if changing the framing from “doing” to “trying” would help
"But I am trying to believe there is more to a human life than how efficiently it converts energy into labor."
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
This thought pattern of "I will die if I don't work" comes up so often. The streets are not filled with bodies. There are people who are chronically unemployed, and women who left the workforce to care for their children and never returned/returned after 15 years, and they're not dead...
There are a lot more ways of living in the world than our main story here in the West.
We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output. We wouldn’t even notice this expenditure, let alone whine about it. But what we are providing is actually “Healthcare. Specialists. Medications. Supplements. Mobility aids. Physical therapy. Accessible housing. Delivery fees when you cannot physically shop for yourself. Ride shares when public transportation is inaccessible. Caregiving.” and this turns out to be enough effort to make society groan and strain.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
I’m saying that providing a better standard of living to adults who cannot work is something we are spending ~3% of our GDP and 5% of all fulltime workers on.
That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.
The US spend like 66% of our federal budget on these things. Hard to imagine significantly increasing it and “hardly noticing”. People notice higher taxes in California; people notice higher taxes in Europe.
We spend that much because of inefficiencies in the system designed to maintain the wealth of the wealthy as well as legacy business models. It's propped up by lobbyists for same.
POSIWID and its purpose is not providing efficient and effective healthcare.
> We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output.
I absolutely agree. We spend $30K/year per person (not per household, per person!) under the poverty line, and that's only on HUD, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. These resources should be lavished on those who actually need them. The tricky part is dealing with the perverse incentives which come with doing right by the disabled. The obscene abuse of military disability benefits is a case in point.
> It’s there every time you meet someone new and one of their first questions is, “What do you do?” They’re not asking about your passions, your hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time. They’re asking how you make money. How you turn yourself into income.
For the longest time whenever I'd meet someone at a party I would ask "so, what do you spend your time on?" because I specifically didn't want to box them into asking how they make money. I wanted to hear about their passions or hobbies or even the mundane tasks.
Instead, pretty much everyone told me about their jobs.
Worth is subjective. You are worth something to someone regardless of your job. If you have a small child are their whole world. Same with your parents. Trying to garner sympathy and have strangers assign worth to you is pointless - because strangers don't value anyone around them for the simple fact that they don't interact with them.
Whether you agree or not - productivity is important. If there are more people that need support than those that can 'produce' the system does not work.
> Earn slightly too much, and vital support disappears
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
I would have said it needs to taper off, not just stop, but reading it described in black and white made me think "actually, why _not_ just stop at a threshhold?".
If you can get 2k a month (all numbers pulled from my butt) in disability support, and at some point get a job offer which will give you the same, why _shouldn't_ you work? Non-monetary forms of support should probably continue, or even be increased, depending on what you're going to need to be able to work.
> My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
The current climate does seem quite unforgiving for anyone that didn’t make good choices along the way. Even a sub optimal career choice or something has rough outcomes.
I think it would be wonderful if there were more work arrangements that fit a person who can write a lot - but intermittently and unpredictably. Right now, that's not the case. That's one of the author's main points. (Even for things like highly-paid, high-skill part time work: its as rare as hen's teeth)
I think part of the lie is that we live for and unto ourselves. We instinctively know it's not true, yet for much of our lives we live as if it is. Until one day we find out what we knew all along.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
In the US, these two ideas seem conflated enough that they are often essentially conveyed as a single message: if you can't work, you're dragging everyone else down. That leads to the internalized ableism with its guilt and shame. It also leads to peer judgement and the fear of same.
This post reminds me of the book recommendation shared on Facebook.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
Reducing your worth to mere productivity is myopic. Your worth is what you bring others, and while for some people it can include literal production for others it doesn’t have to. There’s wisdom, emotional support, and many other things.
I think what gets lost when we value productivity above everything is community and humanity.
At the end of the day, I just want to be around people who care, having a good time together. Nothing seems worth doing if it doesn't eventually get you that.
I've always seen my "excess productivity" as something to spend building a society where people actually commune together, and where we have each other's backs.
I don't want to walk through a city and see people suffering or living on the street. I never assumed the solution was to hide them so productive people don't have to look at them. I assumed it was to support people well enough that we don't have this problem.
You never know when you'll be the next one to have bad luck.
I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.
There's nothing wrong with valuing productivity and unvaluing unproductivity, but capitalism fetishizes it to the extreme, kills people who don't have it, and defines the One True Productivity that you have to meet to not be killed. A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:
- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.
- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.
- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.
- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.
- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.
vs.
- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.
I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.
>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.
I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.
The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.
A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)
This is flagrantly false, and I suspect you've never had the chance to glimpse at the entire catalog. Quite a lot of it is _distasteful_ but it's also incredibly niche content from absolute nobodies.
I appreciate your comments here. My takeaway is that the lack of family bonds/expectation of contribution within the family is a bigger factor than simply Capitalism. The key to resilience is tighter family bonds & neighborly bonds (those 2000 villagers would absolutely give you favours if they liked your art and you made some for them)
The author lays most of this at the feet of capitalism, and I agree that the system has excesses that have contributed to the atomization of society, which can cause people to slip through the cracks, but...has any other system been obviously _better_ at supporting those with disabilities? Did feudalism or communism do this better?
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
Democratic socialism. The US has quite a few such experiments like the New Deal. And they've been quite a bit better than the grinding, unbridled industrialism that consumed and spat out young and old alike.
Read up on "democratic socialism" because it was a term I wasn't familar with. I have to say people should be mindful of words and ideas meaning different things in different places.
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
I think what you want is a welfare state, not socialism.
Socialism is not necessarily cuddly. "To each according to his contribution" is the one sentence description of it after all. I want socialism, because it's "to each according to his contribution" but "to each according to his contribution" isn't obviously this nice cuddly we-take-care-of-everybody type thing.
I'd call the New Deal an attempt to bring discipline to go from capitalism to free markets, to control excesses, prevent monopolies and otherwise preventing people from locking down the economy so that there can be competition, and that's a goal compatible with socialism, because it does bring us closer to "to each according to his contribution" but it isn't an attempt at creating socialism, but of breaking capitalism down to create a market economy with free markets (capitalism is not a market economy, capitalism is the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, so capitalism and a market economy with free markets are actually things that are extremely incompatible).
I think most people conflate the 2 things the current problems are not just because of capitalism but rather the capture of the government by capitalism.
I agree with you. I don't believe pure capitalism or pure socialism works; we need something in between. China is somewhat like that, but because of the type of government it has, it is viewed with a jaundiced eye. Countries exist for their citizens, so things like healthcare, housing, and most infrastructure should be provided or subsidized by the government.
After capital reaches a certain amount, wealth is no longer about effort. Capital keeps generating more capital. As long as you tax that capital and force it back into the economy, things will be okay. Otherwise, it will destroy the economy. This is a simple math problem that people, even on Hacker News where logic and math are valued, simply ignore. If the pie grows by 5% but 80 to 90% of that growth is captured by a small percentage, they will keep taking more as their capital increases, leaving a smaller share of the pie to be divided among more and more people. Ie the feudal times where most economic output was controlled by a few. The world is fast moving back to those times.
>the ones most countries implement don't work very well
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.
hEDS and POTS, which is what the author claims to suffer from, are not good reasons for a disability. hEDS is responsive to particular supplements, especially methylfolate, etc., so build up your stack. For me, POTS was caused by a PPI drug, and eventually remedied upon discontinuation of the drug in combination with daily exercise. Afaik, there is no genetic basis for POTS, and if it there were one, it would be unlikely to be the cause. As I keep telling myself, choosing inaction is a personal choice.
I came looking for this comment, as it was difficult for me to tell from the article what was actually wrong with this person. I am not sure why it’s being downvoted, then again I find claims of helplessness frustrating without a lengthy precise list of what has actually been attempted to resolve the issue. If a colleague claimed helplessness with a code bug I would ask what attempts had been made to fix the issue. Why would serious life issues be treated differently? If the colleague with a bug just started crying and vaguely claiming to have tried as much as they could I have to say I would not be impressed.
> Capitalism has defined ‘health’ itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
You're missing my point. Shortage and conflict is the default. It's not a fault unique to capitalism, and to say that it's its fault is missing the mark.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
Well right now there isn't a food shortage so what should we do while there isn't a food shortage? Should we perhaps say, that we only jettison the disabled people once we're actually running out of food and are forced to make a tough decision about who to keep alive, instead of doing it 20 years in advance just because there might be a shortage one day?
Whether we as a society support those who cannot productively contribute is orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity. You can see this in many developed countries, which have wealth and surplus thanks to their capitalistic markets, but they also have high taxes and a strong safety net.
> Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity.
No, it has a lot to say about that. Our system encourages self-interest and maximizing profits, and that is what businesses do. Increases in productivity increase how much there is to skim off the products of said productivity. To them, using it for reasons outside profiteering is an immoral and wasteful. All the biggest players are aligned on this, and they are desperate to get another droplet of productivity by spending their money and power in all the right places. Corruption, favoritism, advertising, propaganda, monopolism (to accrue as much leverage over people and governments as possible). This is the default state that the system leads us to, it's not orthogonal, this is its natural outcome.
The counterexamples are countries that have found ways to counteract this influence in spite of the incentives. Usually it takes the right culture, as well as strong and competent government that looks out for their citizens. Capitalist absolutists rightfully see that all of this hinders their progress, so the fight between the 'make money at all costs' and 'we need to look out for other people' will always continue. If you don't fight it, you get something akin to the modern US.
Capitalism means resource allocation is primarily decided by billionaires. Why would they give resources up in any way that doesn't make them even richer?
No capitalist actually wants free and fair competition. A pure free market isn't the most efficient and productive means of making a profit, and they're in business to make as much money as possible.
What gets aspired to under the guise of "free market capitalism" is deregulation of the market in the ways which allow businesses to exploit consumers without consequences, such as lowering of environmental regulations or safety standards, but regulation when it hinders their competitors and lets them entrench their market position. Free market capitalism fails because of simple human nature - greed doesn't optimize for ethics, so neither do markets.
Any ideal system that simply expects people to act rationally and ethically en masse is doomed to fail, which is why capitalism only works when regulated and in the context of a society with strong social cohesion and a safety net because certain things like education and healthcare shouldn't be subject to free market dynamics.
Right-libertarianism means a system where everyone has maximum liberty including the liberty to take away each other's liberty (as opposed to left-libertarianism where we don't have that liberty) but capitalism means a society where liberty is proportional to capital.
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
Capitalism reinforces individualistic cultures. The reality is humans aren't so different from ants or other social insects. Individuals don't instantly die when alone, yet we survive better and longer together.
Absolutely. It's a gray area though when you become partially able to support yourself. I think this is what the article is pointing out. You have to come to grips with this grim economic reality and it's hard and your future prospects are almost entirely based on where and to whom you were born. The author is simply lucky that they have a safety net. If you are lucky enough to have time to prepare for these things, you can build your own. If you don't prepare, given the opportunity, that's a 'you' problem.
My situation is similar. I'm exhausted from life, and I don't even have a disability
I got scammed and lost all the money I had saved up. AI reduced my workload, and because of the war, factory expansions were canceled, so for a while I had no work at all.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
You gotta start prioritizing 'the soul' over what you think you're supposed to be doing. "Can't even think about marriage?" I bet marriage will take you further than you think. Maybe. But you gotta try. Try coming at it from a different angle. The answer doesn't leap off the page when you tick enough boxes. The answer becomes apparent when you take it.
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
At 53, and someone whose life significantly imploded three years ago (two years before an autism and autistic burnout diagnosis), I'm so fucking grateful that this made it to HN. It needs to be the top post in LinkedIn and forever pinned at the top of everyone's feeds, too.
Not everyone needs to be productive, those of us that are… are here to support. My brother was a cto and got one shotted by a prescribed weed + aderall in CA combo and lack of sleep (schizophrenia genetics in our family line). He is homeless and occasionally lives with us.
> It’s there every time you meet someone new and one of their first questions is, “What do you do?” They’re not asking about your passions, your hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time. They’re asking how you make money. How you turn yourself into income.
I find this to very much be an American thing. In (Continental) Europe you don't get asked this until later (if at all). It doesn't define you like it does in the US.
The author blames capitalism and religion while greatly indulging in his pride, I think.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
The claim that the link between human value and productivity originated in capitalist societies (or via Protestant work ethic) is such bullshit. You think hunter-gatherers valued each other for their "inner worth"? Keep dreaming.
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
It’s always there in the subtext of a lot of alt-med and the sort of pure-eating wellness stuff, that if it doesn’t work then you’re just not trying hard enough and your mindset is wrong. Still got cancer? Well clearly you didn’t juice, enema and positive-think enough! That’s the flipside of every “you can heal yourself!” assertion.
I feel very sorry for this person, as much as I aspire to be out of work one day, I aspire to be out of work on my terms and with enough financial resource to support myself, and I fully expect to still be able to support myself. This is very different from having to face the fact you can’t, and adjust to that fact and then struggle like hell just to survive on barely adequate provision.
Tech people in particular seem to see themselves (ourselves…) as capable, independent and entirely autonomous beings. Being forced to reframe your whole existence must be very tough.
“As though my body’s inability to keep pace with capitalism says something fundamental about who I am.”
What would his body’s inability to keep pace say under socialism or something else? In any case, he is unable to provide for himself and must rely on others. In the case of capitalism, there is less contribution from the general public and more from personal sources ( I.e. his mother ).
Thinking altruistically, it’s more fair to share the burden across all society. But that introduces a danger— bureaucracies lack the accountability that private sources automatically provide. That system will be less efficient and more costly to run, it’s a matter of degree.
It’s a hard problem. Perhaps over time, as we become more and more prosperous, the cost of the inefficiency will be less relevant and we’ll default to the more balanced version.
Capitalism does not depend upon self-sufficiency. This sounds like total nonsense. In fact, the obviousness of comparative advantage and the benefits of trade that are common among market economies clearly illustrate that interdependence is a crucial aspect of capitalist societies. In fact, self-sufficiency is a characteristic of socialist groups - all of whom want to run their own farm with their own this and that. Similarly the socialist and communist nations wanted to wall themselves off so that they only produce for themselves inside their borders what they want and so on.
Also what's all this about the body that never breaks. We have insurance schemes because there is uncertainty about the human body. What are annuities? Contract law allows for exemptions for acts of god like if a hurricane hits you.
Listen, this person's life sucks. And it's important that society not abandon them. But that doesn't mean they can talk nonsense. This kind of suffering theology where we believe someone whose life is hard has access to some deep truth has no basis in reality. In fact, I'd argue that their thought is far more likely to be disordered.
I mean... I'm sure it's not easy being a disabled artist but this feels a lot like undeservedly blaming the rest of society.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
This is a very sad story, especially on the health side.
But rhe fact they keep going on about capitalism demonstrates their main problem. In reality we don't live in capitalism or neoliberalism, but a space where government legislation and taxation determines most things, and if you think more of the same is going to magically solve things, you've been sold a pup. It's hard to start a business (capitalism) mainly because of government economic control.
At best we have a situation where the top companies and government have converged with one another and co-operate whether through the World Economic Forum or otherwise.
The digital ID thing we see just now is driven by governments worldwide.
The site is full of people, who believe in capitalism like a religion, slave their life to labour while being paid enough to feel good and better than others.
And plenty of tankies striving for a communist utopia, fully convinced the 140 million lives their ideology has cost so far is a small price to pay for entry into their stalinist paradise.
Yeah it's one or the other...the communist, the enemies, the infidels, it's a blind ideology, almost dogmatic, but that is exactly what is needed to slave labor millions..same folks talking about AI/robotics automating all the value creation preaching capitalism which is clearly unsustainable economical arrangement.
But anyway, you are clearly one of the people I'm describing.. unfortunately, it is unsustainable system both from an economical and environmental perspectives. And I won't argue about mental health, which you would probably label as lazy commie or something.
Are you excited to go to Mars? like heaven but for capitalist?
Ffs, this whole thread is just full of toxic positivity as far as I'm concerned.
The reality of it is that the reason why it hurts is you're essentially being kept alive artificially. As at any other time period you'd have just starved to death or died to freezing a winter or two later, putting an end to the misery.
Can you still have fun moments and learn to live your life as a glorified leech? Sure, a lot of people do so, and our society has decided that's for the best.
And in case you or someone else has an issue with the term leech here I'm going to be extra clear: you need to face reality to get over this pain. Accept what you have been forced to become. Then you can make an effort to life with your lot in life, and potentially find acceptance to the cards you've been dealt.
Probably wasn't your fault and almost certainly unfair, but that's just how life is
I'm very sorry to read of the author's experiences; a permanent disability can be a terrible thing to have to live with.
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
It’s sad to see people in the thread conflate capitalist greed with the “Protestant work ethic.” Despite the popularity of prosperity gospel teaching in the US, Jesus’ actual teachings clearly condemn greed and oppression of those who have less. A work ethic is still valuable, because goods have to be produced, but the reason we can’t solve worldwide poverty by just writing a check is that oppressive leaders at some point in the chain will use that money to enrich themselves, or they will take it from those who can’t defend themselves.
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
“We have enough excess in society”
How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
But individual grocery stores throw out a lot of food each day. So the problem isn't distribution, it's that nobody bought it.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Sounds like something we need to fix then.
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
Yes, make education free, including how to build a home.
> and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem.
As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
Housing is a problem and not surprisingly a very big problem in all the English speaking countries the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, the scarcity of starter homes, high cost, low pay, and a epidemic of those so-called luxury apartments being built everywhere.
Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
Sure, if one ignores constraints then we can do everything. It's like saying that you could find an element in an unsorted array in O(1) if you just pick the right index. Obviously. The part that makes it hard is that you can't pick the right index. Coordination and resource allocation is everything. It's not free. It costs effort just like searching an unsorted array is O(n) worst case. There's no way to not pay the price. Energy has to be expended.
You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
I didn't mean to imply there aren't any constraints.
By the fact medicine has an expiration date on the bottle. You can have so much of it you don't have the chance to use it all before it expires.
It almost seems as if you are trolling. Surely we can, at least, agree that the excesses you mention exist only because of those who produce.
A society where just stating this is called trolling is such a sad society. I pity you and you brainwashed siblings.
it's a very common trolling tactic to imply a controversial thing while overtly saying a less controversial thing
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.
> imply
Have I said anything to the contrary?
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
This is an issue, but billionaires are a greater issue.
You could take away 100% of billionaires capital to redistribute and end up in the exact same place in 4 years.
You would not end up in the same place because then you'd be in a world without billionaires, so you would not have people who can too easily just buy every politician and law they wish for their own perpetuation.
That alone would be a massive win.
It's not the ~50 billionares I'm worried about. They are human. You can appeal to Bill Gate's desire to leave a legacy he's proud of. You can appeal to Elon Musk's desire for technological progress.
What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
50???
> Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests
"Thiel's Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech" [2024] https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Ironically, that's the saved copy hosted by Palantir itself...
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.
Is there a name for the phenomenon in which you look at something and know that there is something wrong with it but struggle to identify the problem?
I got this feeling looking at the (non)word cantine.
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.
> it kills the incentive to do more
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.
My observation is that if we leave our recognition up to people with power, they will choose to keep it for themselves or give it to their friends a majority of the time and that seems fucked up to continue to allow in a just society
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
Maybe we should start requiring companies to pay a percent of wages in equity. That would at least allow workers to share in a company’s success.
Take a few moments to think about how companies would (easily) shift their behavior to avoid this
It wouldn't be too hard I don't think. Avoid having employees by making everything a short term contract / gig style work
So make it apply to those people too. Make them legally employees for this purpose.
I'll always liked this idea until trying to map it out myself, and always running aground, preferring performance bonuses instead.
You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
You do not get equity from your comoany?
Pff, what? No.
You're in a super small bubble if you think earning equity in your employer's company is standard.
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.
If you are saying we should do a better job of keeping track of that, I don't think many would disagree with you.
Reminder that in the USA the Republicans have had an intentional policy of introducing these sorts of issues into the system. They call it 'starve the beast' and the goal is to delegitimize government/undermine it's financial stability completely so that they can push their agendas.
For 40 years, half the government (the Republicans) have been trying to break things/damage things/induce huge debt loads/underfund programs so they can't succeed.
Look at what Republicans has done to governance/oversite Inspectors General offices this current term. They have removed their ability to be neutral observers/oversite. Republicans do not care about fighting any of the things you listed, and in fact have been encouraging them for 40 years hoping by making things worse they can finally win on their argument 'government doesn't work' leaving out 'because we've have actively worked to break it for 40 years'.
Why do we need an incentive to do more?
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.
Have you looked at wealth distribution or do you just read social media headlines and comments all day?
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
See that 50-90% and 90-99%?
That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money.
Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class.
If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no publication has ever published this chart?
That data is published quite often, no conspiracy here.
The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
Reminder it has been the intentional policy of the Republican party since the 1980s to 'starve the beast'. That policy includes pushing tax cut after tax cut in order to run up debt to weaking the government/it's ability to fund programs, and then make claims just as OP has.
The rich have our money. The money given to them via irresponsible tax cuts for the last 40 years in an intentional policy to fiscally damage the government so much it fails.
You keep posting this brain-dead line in these threads, without any numbers or evidence to support it. It's like you're just copy-pasting without reading the comments you're replying to.
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...
It is just too much.
Where did you end up? Do you have a way to PM you?
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
Tou've said it perfectly.
Last time when link between work and material comfort was disconnected was communism.
It looked good on paper from 1920's perspective, but was a downward spiral.
If we are to be functioning society, people need motivation to do their best ... and then, there's some spare wealth for the unfortunate.
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
This is why we pass laws making it illegal to not produce excess.
Take that capitalist pig!
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
Just as an aside, I suspect the last line had an implied "/s". If so, I think they really should have included it.
True, as I read back it seems it was sarcasm...very short sighted on my side...
You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
I think the key part of the parent was talking about disabled individuals.
I don’t think anyone is advocating to provide a free ride for capable individuals
Of course someone has to produce/work harder — and the parent is arguing that there is already more than enough extra
> I don’t think anyone is advocating to provide a free ride for capable individuals
Unless the capable individuals control a lot of capital - then free-riding is expected via the "Job-creator exception clause"
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.
If you think capitalism is bad then wait until you see how many more "bullshit jobs" are needed for socialism.
I think that’s what they call a ‘false dilemma’.
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...
Switzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.
Norway is kind of the same, but they made a decision to set up the Norwegian sovereign fund to save and invest that North Sea oil money their counterparts however on the other side of the North Sea, Great Britain decided to spend like a drunken sailors most of the money ended up mostly in the hands of the upper crust of the country. if a country is wealthy and unselfish enough, they can make provisions for society in general.
What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of that rule.
Do you know how tone deaf this is? Some people literally can’t afford their medication and you are saying “meh, we have too much already”
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
You are failing to analyze the system corectly.
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
“If you can afford it” is not efficient. It’s merely priority queue vs FIFO wherein it is decided that some folks get to skip lines based on some arbitrary merit.
If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
Are you getting faster or better outcomes in America than when taking _private_ treatment in Canada, or do you need the treatment in Canada to he public for your claim to hold?
I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
If you have the money, you can get excellent healthcare in almost any civilized country. You're free to pay for your treatment in Canada, too.
The US has (without much debate) the absolute best healthcare on Earth if money isn't an issue. There are so many more experts in so many more fields with access to so much more cutting edge technology that...well rich people travel to the US to get care.
I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem.
"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
you are a funny man. i live in the one of the wealthiest areas of the US, c with good healthcare: specialists are very hard to get. service rationing is everywhere. we are losing doctors.
your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
The whole point of the article was that disabled people cannot afford it. That's why we need to socialize medicine.
no, it's not.
The real fiscal burdens on your society are your military spending and the interest on the debt you have already taken on.
Interest and military and take a distant third and fourth place respectively. Here are the rough proportions of the top US federal budget expenditures according to the Treasury Department:
- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%
- Social Security: 23%
- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%
- National Defense: 13%
And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.
Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?
Then get ready to be a slave, bc noone, absolutely noone gives things for free, which is, in my view, reasonable.
> Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?
Why would I believe this?
You don't have to believe it. It is a risk, you simply have to mitigate it.
I think historic records of production have a lot of wisdom. For whoever it is interested.
> Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?
What happens when labour-based production is fully replaced by automated factories? Then ?
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services.
The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
I agree with the system you describe, i tend to disagree with the conclusion.
I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.
Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.
My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.
One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.
Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
Starving the beast and gorging the beast both accomplish the same thing.
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
How do you hide something in a closed loop system such as an economy?
offshore Swiss accounts. opaque and complex corporate ownership structures. land.
you failed to answer my question.
either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded.
either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth.
land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)
> why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics.
Cognitive dissonance, they understand but refuse to admit it because it conflicts with their world view.
What you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like.
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
I have no idea how you've come to the conclusions about what I've written that you have.
Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.
While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.
Do you really believe that nonsense? By that logic, we should legalize all drugs and optimize that LSD supply chain.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
What a tone deaf comment.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between.
People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS
> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors
Just replace investors with tax payers.
it's not a ponzi scheme either. in a ponzi scheme the top of the funnel gets rich off the funds of new investors who are expecting a return. my taxes are not an investment secretly used to make some people rich by fooling newcomers, they're explicitly directly funding the current beneficiaries.
While that is true, the problem is they have raised the age required to receive benefits in the past and they likely will do it again. Many people will die off before they receive the benefits. The system is also probably going to go insolvent in the early 2030s and the benefits will be cut by over 20%.
Many young people feel like they are going to pay into SS for 50 years to pay for the older generations and then when they retire they are going to receive less than they paid in. Obviously that may or may not be the case, but there is a general feeling that they are being gypped in order to pay for the older generation's retirement that they will not get themselves.
What a great collection of incorrect right wing talking points!
Look up when benefits began to be paid. The current payments very much and by design pay for the current retirees. The idea that this is some kind of elaborate “scam” when it is one of those things that every other civilized country has figured out is hilarious. Go travel. Go talk to some retirees there. Turn off the Fox News.
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
A billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.
Depends on what's being compared.
Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
I hate being a contrarian for my first comment, but not everyone is lucky enough or afforded parents and opportunity like Hawking.
He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.
I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
The people getting paid by the other time I spend productively.
The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go.
If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you.
The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others.
Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity.
We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
Because one's value to society doesn't determine their wage (an economic matter) or status (a social matter). The parent comment is right. What you've pointed out is a separate "injustice" of a kind: that we generally under-appreciate others.
> then your worth is very much linked to your productivity
Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious…
The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck..
> the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more
Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions.
It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15).
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
also the comment
"I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
thanks a lot for the clarification and effort for it.
Maybe the other reactions made it generally more unclear, but was unsure about the core message.
This is much more clear and direct, and yes I was believing you meant something in that direction.
Regarding the other comment, thanks also, I understand that feeling the moment of having to ask something like that, but I think that if fought with enough pragmacity I think I would try to overcome the psychological part because the need would overcome the shame, and that would overcome the situation. or that is not feasible in that case?
I'm sure it's feasible, but it's treating the symptom rather than the disease. I'd rather people never get to the point of having to call a friend because they can't afford food today than them not feeling shame when it does happen.
Relevant:
In Praise of Idleness
https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
> Is playing Candy Crush productive?
If you enjoy it, then yes.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
> If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I'm using the word differently to you. It's productive insofar as you enjoy doing it.
Just to make a point, have these two definitions from Wiktionary:
> Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
Capable of producing enjoyment, yup. I'd call playing Candy Crush productive if enjoyment is your goal.
> Yielding good or useful results
The good result here is, again, the enjoyment of whatever. If you enjoy playing Candy Crush, then playing it gives you a good or useful result, namely the enjoyment of playing it.
> I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
If someone truly finds Candy Crush enjoyable to the point they do it everyday or whatever, and we're not talking addiction (so they're not actually enjoying it, but rather feel compelled to do it), then more power to them. I wish my desires were so simple.
Oh come on. Parent is right, at this point, words have no meaning. By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.
YES I am vegan and YES I eat meat. We exist
> By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.
Yes. That word is only useful insofar as you say or imply a goal. Candy Crush is not productive in gathering food.
Most people imply the goal to be money. I'd rather imply enjoyment. See my OP.
And yet, you seemed to have been using it the way the rest of us are in this discussion, right here:
You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I think the issue here is that everyone else is having a discussion about economics, how we efficiently allocate scarce resources as a society, and the role that individual productivity plays in that allocation. You're having a discussion about enjoying your life. Which is great, if you want to play Candy Crush all day and call it "productive" because that makes you feel better, go for it.
But I'm not interested in paying your bills so you can.
Even if you're bad at productivity, even in the sense of producing enjoyment, you're still worth so much more.
My OP was explicitly about not taking economic productivity as the be-all-end-all of someone.
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder
Agree completely. Its hard to tease out what percent is a cheating response due to increasing accommodations and actual pathologizing.
Some personal observations, I would say about 90%+ of "emotional support dogs" are fake. And I can't remember the last time I saw someone that was actually disabled use a disabled parking spot. They always have the proper license plate or mirror tag, but every time I've seen someone enter their vehicle it would appear that they do not need special accommodations afforded by the preferred parking spot.
> the protestant work ethic,
I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt.
Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful.
I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.
Most Catholics also don’t believe in double predestination and think that (more or less but that’s the gist) god has pre-picked people who are destined to be successful and those which are destined to be lazy and worthless or even outright evil. That’s one of the core tenets of Calvinism and similar religions.
Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?
As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true
you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?
Yes, it is more productive. Becoming more familiar with the English language and skillfully written prose is good. The notion that modern prose is of lesser quality is widespread.
This comment reads as snarky post-modernism.
I think you missed my point. But you think the bounds of every field of research and technology has expanded, except language?
To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that.
I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive.
There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
> Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?
No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
not every profession has excess, not sure I can get on board with the idea that candy crush is of equal value to any job. money is just a measure of goods and services.
The Protestant Work Ethic is just learned slavery by another name
I am not from the US, so this "protestant work ethics" sound foreign to me. And to be honest, very harmful.
Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard.
Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well
I was raised as a Buddhist and in Buddhism it says that the biggest wealth you can have in your life is good health. Most of us take it for granted, that how lucky we are to born without a disability and can function doing daily tasks like taking a shower, going to the toilet without the help of someone else. I cannot imagine how difficult life would be with a disability and even thinking about it makes me anxious
I always try and remember that the majority of the creatures of this planet do not have the luxury to live in an environment where they can freely choose to shield themselves from bad weather and regulate temperature of their surroundings to their convenience.
Even humans only learned how to do it well relatively recently
I've spent 6 weeks on wheelchair and few more months on crutches after a nasty paragliding accident. The concept of just standing upright and walking straight, that we take for granted as much as 2+2=4, was suddenly impossible, and after getting it eventually back through extensive physiotherapy its something I cherish to this day. The freedom it grants is unimaginable unless one was robbed of it. Simply reaching on higher shelves to get some food became impossible without help.
Bad things have often silver lining if one is looking with right kind of eye.
> after a nasty paragliding accident
I’m fairly new to paragliding. What happened? Have you returned to flying?
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.
This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
> throughout history
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
> the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states.
in which they lived in families, extended families and tribes as the primary units. I didn't understand your argument at all.
The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.
Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.
It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.
Tribes aren't the nuclear family. The nuclear family lives separate from the tribe.
The Odyssey is in theaters right now; it rather famously deals with the importance of family and that's a close to 3000 year old poem.
Not really relevant at all
How do you figure? It seems trivially relevant to asserting that family has only mattered for 200 years.
I suspect you're actually talking about the current western/american conception of family (fair!) but it doesn't make sense to ignore this obvious miscommunication.
To be fair (and I’m certainly not saying its not a good movie) Odyssey has very little to do with the original story or the worldviews and values described by Homer if anything at all. It’s a modern fantasy movie (i.e. the characters world views are mostly modern) loosely inspired by the Odyssey.
Of course this is true! But family still plays a major role in both versions
There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
[2] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/
Wasn't "nuclear family" something marketers invented in post-war USA to sell more houses?
Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...
The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_and_Genealo...
I know several families who are absolutely not a building block of society. Some not by choice.
I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.
e.g. The claim: Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say: I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
You’re right it looks that way now i read it back. I’m sorry.
I understood your point. You did nothing wrong, the person replying to you read too much offense into what you wrote. They're looking for a fight. Ignore them.
All the time? HN attracts some ... interesting ... characters so I accept it as something that has likely happened at some point, but something common? Anecdotes aren't shared in some kind of weird effort to falsify an imagined mathematical proof. They are shared because that is the natural progression of a discussion.
More commonly we see things like,
A: "I went to work today"
B: "One time I was on my way to work but I slipped on the ice in my driveway and ended up in the ER with a broken leg instead"
A: "Your broken leg does not disprove that I went to work today..."
Where A is trying to relive their glory days on Reddit where such a retort would have been considered funny, but thankfully most HN accounts know better than to think that is still funny, or that it was ever considered funny on HN. This thread being illustrative of one such exception, of course.
My apologies, for that was not my intention. More that it’s not all binary good or bad. I should not have typed that fallacy.
Why would someone take time out of their day to contradict or narrow someone else's so-called argument? Nobody cares about your argument. Anecdotes are shared because someone found an anecdote, that came to mind based on previous discussion, to be interesting. Sometimes that interest isn't shared and the thread dies there, but other times others do find interest in it and discussion continues. That's the nature of discussion.
It's cultural.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
> Everytime you meet someone new and they ask “What do you do?” they’re not asking about your passions, hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time; but how you make money, how you turn yourself into income.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
A lot were taught to follow their passions too, so they can have the presumption that what you do for a living == your passion.
My answer: "Whatever it takes"
in what cultures do you think it will never be asked?
I've found I ask that question often, but for me it's because I'm interested in learning about new stuff, so if they work with something I'm not familiar with I'd find it interesting to talk about that.
However if I sense they're just in it for the paycheck then I try to ask about hobbies or similar.
> What do you do?
The first question when you meet someone is often to measure your status.
In New Zealand, different cities had different questions. Auckland: where do you live (using suburb as a proxy for status), Christchurch: what school did you go to (status used to be highly linked to your high school), Wellington: what do you do (a lot of people move to Wellington to work and it has a very wide variety of professional and government jobs).
It depends somewhat on context since often status is implied by the situation you've met someone. I've even had people straight up ask: how much do you earn.
One thing I love about living in Berlin is that you can meet a dozen stranger and spend hours with them, and no one remembers to ask that question.
> I’m 38 years old and I just had to ask my mom if I could borrow money [...] potentially spending the next 50 years without stable income
Without stable income it might be more like 20 years. (I wish you personally a long and bountiful life!)
I'm in a similar boat. As a 3rd child in a somewhat poor family, I do not have any inheritance and actually need to help my mom financially (though it's not a burden). My wife is also from a rural area and her inheritance is barely worth 5 (hypothetical) figures. We never got or will get anything given to us for free. We are in our 40s and we completely gave up on having children (though it was not overall a financially-motivated choice) or property (this one certainly is). Live day to day while I can work, and die without regrets when I cannot anymore. Thanks to AI that happens probably sooner than later.
If you live your life in stress it makes it strange. Breathe less, stress less.
It's more of a resignation I think? An overwhelming majority of people (on Earth, I don't mean the highly skewed US/EU citizens) are one accident away from total ruin. I don't stress about it but I also recognize how broken we are still, as society.
If it is a game of survival yes, we are living on the edge. Is it.
The idea that "hard work, discipline, frugality" are Calvinist and Protestant inventions may be the most preposterous thing I've read today. As if the rest of the world or previous eras valued self-indulgence and wasteful lavishness.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
https://www.britannica.com/money/Protestant-ethic
It's mere slander. It reminds me of the Smithsonian's insistence that punctuality, hard work, objectivity, and politeness were aspects of "white dominant culture" and "white supremacy".
https://web.archive.org/web/20200715153724/https://nmaahc.si...
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
(His title is sarcastic. They aren't known to have done that in particular.)
Even more absurd when most of the physical products are made by hard working people on the other side of the world right now.
Or the good ol days when you use to go to prison for having too much debt.
Agreed. I believe the special sauce Calvinism added was equating those values with moral success/failure, and therefore spiritual salvation. It gave "not working hard enough" an eternal consequence. It may not have been the first, but Calvinism certainly made it mainstream in the west. See also: how frequently critiques of the poor slide into moral judgements.
It was a strategic invention that has only ever applied to the plebs, the plutocrats have always been exempt from it.
It's simple, what is written here should be part of basic education for every human being/worker.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you! And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
Fortunately, just about all of those are the result of slow poisoning via industrialized food sources. And can be remedied via diet. It's not fun wanting chili fries and having to eat eggs and home-made yogurt instead. But it's working in my case and I have the labs to prove it.
unfortunately wrong diet is just another consequence of the bad life loop.
claiming that is a just a result of industrial food is quite bold, even if yes thats probably cause of many many problems for humans.
If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD).
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
Wouldn't it be marvelous if these were mandatory and paid by state with huge scale benefits ?
Worker's compensation is similar, and that actually is mandatory for employers to offer in most US states. But IIUC, that's only for injuries that are caused by your job in some way?
It’s for injuries that take place while you’re on the job. Chronic issues are difficult to prove.
I've looked into these kinds of policies a couple of times now, and the premia are just astronomical. (At least from the quotes I've been given).
It's kind of understandable, given that the risk is not all that low. But my guess would be that it's amplified by fraudulent claims in relation to psychological illness, burnout, etc. I asked my insurance guy to exclude those, but, apparently, it's something he can't do.
You can kind of see, how this works for a roofer: If you hurt your leg and can no longer climb a roof, the policy pays. What does it take for me to no longer be able to sit in front of a screen? Well, it would almost have to be something in the psychological realm. Sure, there's the possibility of an illness with chronic pain or cognitive impairment, but those are orders of magnitude less likely, so the psychological stuff is what completely dominates the high premia.
In the US they are. The public programs are SSI and SSDI with both administered by Social Security.
For anything more, this private insurance market works just fine for those who opt into it.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
don't forget the legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer making the LTD insurance actually pay and a second legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer suing the primary LCI as they will likely claim that case isn't covered by their policy.
Bingo. And remember, these lawsuits to establish the magnitude of the payout/severity of the injury: you'll be going through them shortly after sustaining a disabling injury.
Except mental health conditions in these plans seem limited to 2 years. For all the talk of mental health is health, this seems to run directly counter to that.
> Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue.
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
> Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic
...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.
(IANA scholar, but I play one on the internet.)
No, Weber is not the current state-of-the-art, but you can see how was a bit suspicious (given the evidence that Weber was working with) that the Reformation and the first meaningful economic growth possibly ever (the "Great Divergence") in history seem to have started at approximately the same time and in the same places (England, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, Holland).
We now have scholarship based on earlier evidence (it turns out that availability of the printing press massively increased the surviving sources we have about "early modern" Europe versus the earlier manuscript-driven ages, so our sources have a distinct bias toward the post-Gutenberg world -- and the printing press itself is probably a major node in the web of causes and effects that drive this transition!) and AIUI the best current guess is that the Black Death is what initially kickstarted economic growth (the "Little Divergence"), possibly by effectively ending serfdom in those places as agricultural labor become much dearer than before the plague. The Reformation, under this view of things, is more of a consequence of economic growth -- the ranks of increasingly numerous rich-and-influential commoners and burghers asserting their place in a social order defined by the Roman church -- rather than a cause of it.
Considering Weber was publishing give or take a century ago, it not being state of the art isn't surprising. It's still influential because it established a lot of the tools used by modern sociologists, as well as providing a counterpoint to Marxist thought. Personally I'm mostly indifferent to the claim.
You're also misreading the claim, the Protestant work ethic is not claiming any virtue on anyone's behalf. Weber's claim is making a casual connection between the development of capitalism and religious covenant. It's certainly not the prescriptive theory you're making it out to be.
Well of course Weber isn't exactly state-of-the-art sociology, but when people say "the Protestant work ethic" that is basically one widely-accepted name (a pointer if you will) to an idea that sociologists have long recognized is present in some segments of many societies.
Well, everyone saw the freeloader class in Catholic countries too - clergy.
I'm under the impression the phrase was used because lay Catholics had more days off work since they wouldn't work on Holy Days. Protestants had significantly less Holy Days to the point where some denominations only avoided working on Sundays. Protestants used this phrase as an insult against Catholics for having more days off work. It had nothing to do with freeloading.
I've felt worthless for a long time. Sucked at school, suck at university, jobless. But something about the things I do has given me comfort. Trying to make music, trying to draw. And just doing the things another version of me would look at and think "that's nice"
I've also been a social outcast for a while now. But putting my creative works out there makes me feel like I'm building the tools to appreciate myself and be appreciated by others. And knowing I can be appreciated, even if I'm not, is enough to give me a sense of self worth.
Reframing the thing you’re doing as “trying to do the thing” struck me as something kinda powerful. You’ve got to suck at something before you don’t.
I’ve found that if I start something new, say learning to carve wood, I might compare myself to others in an unhealthy way, not improve as fast as I want to, or something else, and sorta psych myself out of it. I wonder if changing the framing from “doing” to “trying” would help
That's awesome! Love that stubborn boldness.
"But I am trying to believe there is more to a human life than how efficiently it converts energy into labor."
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
They may not feel ashamed, but they'll still feel dead when they have no food and shelter.
This thought pattern of "I will die if I don't work" comes up so often. The streets are not filled with bodies. There are people who are chronically unemployed, and women who left the workforce to care for their children and never returned/returned after 15 years, and they're not dead...
There are a lot more ways of living in the world than our main story here in the West.
We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output. We wouldn’t even notice this expenditure, let alone whine about it. But what we are providing is actually “Healthcare. Specialists. Medications. Supplements. Mobility aids. Physical therapy. Accessible housing. Delivery fees when you cannot physically shop for yourself. Ride shares when public transportation is inaccessible. Caregiving.” and this turns out to be enough effort to make society groan and strain.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here.
Are you saying we're providing those things instead of food? Or that if we provided food we wouldn't need to provide those things?
If so, that's patently false. A lot more than food is needed to give someone a better standard of living.
I’m saying that providing a better standard of living to adults who cannot work is something we are spending ~3% of our GDP and 5% of all fulltime workers on.
That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
The US spend like 66% of our federal budget on these things. Hard to imagine significantly increasing it and “hardly noticing”. People notice higher taxes in California; people notice higher taxes in Europe.
We spend that much because of inefficiencies in the system designed to maintain the wealth of the wealthy as well as legacy business models. It's propped up by lobbyists for same.
POSIWID and its purpose is not providing efficient and effective healthcare.
> We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output.
I absolutely agree. We spend $30K/year per person (not per household, per person!) under the poverty line, and that's only on HUD, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. These resources should be lavished on those who actually need them. The tricky part is dealing with the perverse incentives which come with doing right by the disabled. The obscene abuse of military disability benefits is a case in point.
> It’s there every time you meet someone new and one of their first questions is, “What do you do?” They’re not asking about your passions, your hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time. They’re asking how you make money. How you turn yourself into income.
For the longest time whenever I'd meet someone at a party I would ask "so, what do you spend your time on?" because I specifically didn't want to box them into asking how they make money. I wanted to hear about their passions or hobbies or even the mundane tasks.
Instead, pretty much everyone told me about their jobs.
Probably because a lot of people spend a lot of time at their jobs :)
I prefer "what do you like to do", personally
I know once I'm injured I will be homeless again. I don't have a support system of any kind.
What kind of work do you do right now?
Worth is subjective. You are worth something to someone regardless of your job. If you have a small child are their whole world. Same with your parents. Trying to garner sympathy and have strangers assign worth to you is pointless - because strangers don't value anyone around them for the simple fact that they don't interact with them.
Whether you agree or not - productivity is important. If there are more people that need support than those that can 'produce' the system does not work.
> Earn slightly too much, and vital support disappears
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
I would have said it needs to taper off, not just stop, but reading it described in black and white made me think "actually, why _not_ just stop at a threshhold?".
If you can get 2k a month (all numbers pulled from my butt) in disability support, and at some point get a job offer which will give you the same, why _shouldn't_ you work? Non-monetary forms of support should probably continue, or even be increased, depending on what you're going to need to be able to work.
> My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
But at a certain level, you'll need a step function to go from 0 (none; no taper) to 1 (taper).
I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
This is true only in the trivial sense that one can't process a payment for less than a penny.
Perhaps too low. Definitely too much of a step function.
The current climate does seem quite unforgiving for anyone that didn’t make good choices along the way. Even a sub optimal career choice or something has rough outcomes.
I didn’t have to read to the bottom to notice the autism. I feel that’s the biggest “disability” there.
If you can write so many posts, you can get an office job or get paid for writing.
I think it would be wonderful if there were more work arrangements that fit a person who can write a lot - but intermittently and unpredictably. Right now, that's not the case. That's one of the author's main points. (Even for things like highly-paid, high-skill part time work: its as rare as hen's teeth)
I face same situation. I lost my job six months ago. My previous boss thought he can use codex generate everything.
I think part of the lie is that we live for and unto ourselves. We instinctively know it's not true, yet for much of our lives we live as if it is. Until one day we find out what we knew all along.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
Perhaps.
In the US, these two ideas seem conflated enough that they are often essentially conveyed as a single message: if you can't work, you're dragging everyone else down. That leads to the internalized ableism with its guilt and shame. It also leads to peer judgement and the fear of same.
It’s human nature.
Nature != Good
We miss that much of the time, and it causes all manner of suffering.
This post reminds me of the book recommendation shared on Facebook.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
Reducing your worth to mere productivity is myopic. Your worth is what you bring others, and while for some people it can include literal production for others it doesn’t have to. There’s wisdom, emotional support, and many other things.
I think what gets lost when we value productivity above everything is community and humanity.
At the end of the day, I just want to be around people who care, having a good time together. Nothing seems worth doing if it doesn't eventually get you that.
I've always seen my "excess productivity" as something to spend building a society where people actually commune together, and where we have each other's backs.
I don't want to walk through a city and see people suffering or living on the street. I never assumed the solution was to hide them so productive people don't have to look at them. I assumed it was to support people well enough that we don't have this problem.
You never know when you'll be the next one to have bad luck.
sounds like you need to get a job and stop spending so much.
I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.
There's nothing wrong with valuing productivity and unvaluing unproductivity, but capitalism fetishizes it to the extreme, kills people who don't have it, and defines the One True Productivity that you have to meet to not be killed. A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:
- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.
- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.
- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.
- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.
- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.
vs.
- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.
I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.
oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.
I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.
The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.
A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)
What do you think about that?
Patreon only works for famous people making products that are free to copy. You couldn't fund a statue that way.
> Patreon only works for famous people
This is flagrantly false, and I suspect you've never had the chance to glimpse at the entire catalog. Quite a lot of it is _distasteful_ but it's also incredibly niche content from absolute nobodies.
I appreciate your comments here. My takeaway is that the lack of family bonds/expectation of contribution within the family is a bigger factor than simply Capitalism. The key to resilience is tighter family bonds & neighborly bonds (those 2000 villagers would absolutely give you favours if they liked your art and you made some for them)
The author lays most of this at the feet of capitalism, and I agree that the system has excesses that have contributed to the atomization of society, which can cause people to slip through the cracks, but...has any other system been obviously _better_ at supporting those with disabilities? Did feudalism or communism do this better?
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
Democratic socialism. The US has quite a few such experiments like the New Deal. And they've been quite a bit better than the grinding, unbridled industrialism that consumed and spat out young and old alike.
Read up on "democratic socialism" because it was a term I wasn't familar with. I have to say people should be mindful of words and ideas meaning different things in different places.
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
How does Portugal compare to the US and France? (I actually don't know, though a quick search indicates it's more like France than the US.)
The author of this post apparently lives in Porto.
I think what you want is a welfare state, not socialism.
Socialism is not necessarily cuddly. "To each according to his contribution" is the one sentence description of it after all. I want socialism, because it's "to each according to his contribution" but "to each according to his contribution" isn't obviously this nice cuddly we-take-care-of-everybody type thing.
I'd call the New Deal an attempt to bring discipline to go from capitalism to free markets, to control excesses, prevent monopolies and otherwise preventing people from locking down the economy so that there can be competition, and that's a goal compatible with socialism, because it does bring us closer to "to each according to his contribution" but it isn't an attempt at creating socialism, but of breaking capitalism down to create a market economy with free markets (capitalism is not a market economy, capitalism is the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, so capitalism and a market economy with free markets are actually things that are extremely incompatible).
I think most people conflate the 2 things the current problems are not just because of capitalism but rather the capture of the government by capitalism.
If you don't discipline capitalism with a firm hand, double insulation guarantees that it takes over the government.
I agree with you. I don't believe pure capitalism or pure socialism works; we need something in between. China is somewhat like that, but because of the type of government it has, it is viewed with a jaundiced eye. Countries exist for their citizens, so things like healthcare, housing, and most infrastructure should be provided or subsidized by the government.
Whose effort should be taxed more to provide money to subsidize it?
After capital reaches a certain amount, wealth is no longer about effort. Capital keeps generating more capital. As long as you tax that capital and force it back into the economy, things will be okay. Otherwise, it will destroy the economy. This is a simple math problem that people, even on Hacker News where logic and math are valued, simply ignore. If the pie grows by 5% but 80 to 90% of that growth is captured by a small percentage, they will keep taking more as their capital increases, leaving a smaller share of the pie to be divided among more and more people. Ie the feudal times where most economic output was controlled by a few. The world is fast moving back to those times.
There's no way in hell that humans have tried all possible forms of governance and economic systems.
Even just capitalism with more regulation and safety nets (the ones most countries implement don't work very well) would suffice here.
>the ones most countries implement don't work very well
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.
> which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
It's literally the exact same argument.
Restoring something that was lost is very, very different than creating something that hasn't been done before.
Why?
hEDS and POTS, which is what the author claims to suffer from, are not good reasons for a disability. hEDS is responsive to particular supplements, especially methylfolate, etc., so build up your stack. For me, POTS was caused by a PPI drug, and eventually remedied upon discontinuation of the drug in combination with daily exercise. Afaik, there is no genetic basis for POTS, and if it there were one, it would be unlikely to be the cause. As I keep telling myself, choosing inaction is a personal choice.
I came looking for this comment, as it was difficult for me to tell from the article what was actually wrong with this person. I am not sure why it’s being downvoted, then again I find claims of helplessness frustrating without a lengthy precise list of what has actually been attempted to resolve the issue. If a colleague claimed helplessness with a code bug I would ask what attempts had been made to fix the issue. Why would serious life issues be treated differently? If the colleague with a bug just started crying and vaguely claiming to have tried as much as they could I have to say I would not be impressed.
Yeah seeing these all over the place as if it spreads via social media
> Capitalism has defined ‘health’ itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
You are a fish unable to see water.
Yes, you need food. Guess what, we have plenty of food. But the system for allocating food says this guy doesn't get any because he's disabled.
We could make virtually infinite food as well, but that isn't profitable enough.
We're already using two thirds of an earth for farming. We could make 50% more.
You're missing my point. Shortage and conflict is the default. It's not a fault unique to capitalism, and to say that it's its fault is missing the mark.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
Well right now there isn't a food shortage so what should we do while there isn't a food shortage? Should we perhaps say, that we only jettison the disabled people once we're actually running out of food and are forced to make a tough decision about who to keep alive, instead of doing it 20 years in advance just because there might be a shortage one day?
Whether we as a society support those who cannot productively contribute is orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity. You can see this in many developed countries, which have wealth and surplus thanks to their capitalistic markets, but they also have high taxes and a strong safety net.
> Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity.
No, it has a lot to say about that. Our system encourages self-interest and maximizing profits, and that is what businesses do. Increases in productivity increase how much there is to skim off the products of said productivity. To them, using it for reasons outside profiteering is an immoral and wasteful. All the biggest players are aligned on this, and they are desperate to get another droplet of productivity by spending their money and power in all the right places. Corruption, favoritism, advertising, propaganda, monopolism (to accrue as much leverage over people and governments as possible). This is the default state that the system leads us to, it's not orthogonal, this is its natural outcome.
The counterexamples are countries that have found ways to counteract this influence in spite of the incentives. Usually it takes the right culture, as well as strong and competent government that looks out for their citizens. Capitalist absolutists rightfully see that all of this hinders their progress, so the fight between the 'make money at all costs' and 'we need to look out for other people' will always continue. If you don't fight it, you get something akin to the modern US.
Capitalism means resource allocation is primarily decided by billionaires. Why would they give resources up in any way that doesn't make them even richer?
No, the term for what you describe is "oligarchy".
Under "capitalism", the invisible hand of the free market is supposed to decide resource allocation.
That's right-libertarianism, which is incompatible with capitalism.
That's melting my brain. My understanding is that right-libertarianism and capitalism are not only compatible, they are best friends.
These people use “capitalism” to mean crony capitalism, oligarchy, and corporatocracy.
Those are the forms of capitalism actually practiced in the real world. As opposed to pure free market capitalism, which doesn't actually exist.
When did free-market capitalism stop being something to aspire to though?
No capitalist actually wants free and fair competition. A pure free market isn't the most efficient and productive means of making a profit, and they're in business to make as much money as possible.
What gets aspired to under the guise of "free market capitalism" is deregulation of the market in the ways which allow businesses to exploit consumers without consequences, such as lowering of environmental regulations or safety standards, but regulation when it hinders their competitors and lets them entrench their market position. Free market capitalism fails because of simple human nature - greed doesn't optimize for ethics, so neither do markets.
Any ideal system that simply expects people to act rationally and ethically en masse is doomed to fail, which is why capitalism only works when regulated and in the context of a society with strong social cohesion and a safety net because certain things like education and healthcare shouldn't be subject to free market dynamics.
Right-libertarianism means a system where everyone has maximum liberty including the liberty to take away each other's liberty (as opposed to left-libertarianism where we don't have that liberty) but capitalism means a society where liberty is proportional to capital.
Guess what, we have plenty of food
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
And the sky is gray. I'm not seeing the relevance of either statement.
Are you familiar with the expression “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”? Or killing the goose that laid the golden egg?
Are you familiar with "throw the helve after the hatchet" or "ride Shanks' mare"? Again, I don't see the relevance.
Capitalism reinforces individualistic cultures. The reality is humans aren't so different from ants or other social insects. Individuals don't instantly die when alone, yet we survive better and longer together.
Absolutely. It's a gray area though when you become partially able to support yourself. I think this is what the article is pointing out. You have to come to grips with this grim economic reality and it's hard and your future prospects are almost entirely based on where and to whom you were born. The author is simply lucky that they have a safety net. If you are lucky enough to have time to prepare for these things, you can build your own. If you don't prepare, given the opportunity, that's a 'you' problem.
My situation is similar. I'm exhausted from life, and I don't even have a disability I got scammed and lost all the money I had saved up. AI reduced my workload, and because of the war, factory expansions were canceled, so for a while I had no work at all.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
You gotta start prioritizing 'the soul' over what you think you're supposed to be doing. "Can't even think about marriage?" I bet marriage will take you further than you think. Maybe. But you gotta try. Try coming at it from a different angle. The answer doesn't leap off the page when you tick enough boxes. The answer becomes apparent when you take it.
This lacks relevant details.
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
At 53, and someone whose life significantly imploded three years ago (two years before an autism and autistic burnout diagnosis), I'm so fucking grateful that this made it to HN. It needs to be the top post in LinkedIn and forever pinned at the top of everyone's feeds, too.
Not everyone needs to be productive, those of us that are… are here to support. My brother was a cto and got one shotted by a prescribed weed + aderall in CA combo and lack of sleep (schizophrenia genetics in our family line). He is homeless and occasionally lives with us.
> It’s there every time you meet someone new and one of their first questions is, “What do you do?” They’re not asking about your passions, your hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time. They’re asking how you make money. How you turn yourself into income.
I find this to very much be an American thing. In (Continental) Europe you don't get asked this until later (if at all). It doesn't define you like it does in the US.
The author blames capitalism and religion while greatly indulging in his pride, I think.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
Its also got nothing to do with captialism. Plenty of captialist systems have regulation to cover this.
The claim that the link between human value and productivity originated in capitalist societies (or via Protestant work ethic) is such bullshit. You think hunter-gatherers valued each other for their "inner worth"? Keep dreaming.
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
I'd love to read this. A shame it's on Substack.
In other news, natural selection still applies, even to smart primates in 2026.
What an insane comment. Can't tell if you're serious.
The toxic wellness thing is real.
It’s always there in the subtext of a lot of alt-med and the sort of pure-eating wellness stuff, that if it doesn’t work then you’re just not trying hard enough and your mindset is wrong. Still got cancer? Well clearly you didn’t juice, enema and positive-think enough! That’s the flipside of every “you can heal yourself!” assertion.
I feel very sorry for this person, as much as I aspire to be out of work one day, I aspire to be out of work on my terms and with enough financial resource to support myself, and I fully expect to still be able to support myself. This is very different from having to face the fact you can’t, and adjust to that fact and then struggle like hell just to survive on barely adequate provision.
Tech people in particular seem to see themselves (ourselves…) as capable, independent and entirely autonomous beings. Being forced to reframe your whole existence must be very tough.
“As though my body’s inability to keep pace with capitalism says something fundamental about who I am.”
What would his body’s inability to keep pace say under socialism or something else? In any case, he is unable to provide for himself and must rely on others. In the case of capitalism, there is less contribution from the general public and more from personal sources ( I.e. his mother ).
Thinking altruistically, it’s more fair to share the burden across all society. But that introduces a danger— bureaucracies lack the accountability that private sources automatically provide. That system will be less efficient and more costly to run, it’s a matter of degree.
It’s a hard problem. Perhaps over time, as we become more and more prosperous, the cost of the inefficiency will be less relevant and we’ll default to the more balanced version.
Capitalism does not depend upon self-sufficiency. This sounds like total nonsense. In fact, the obviousness of comparative advantage and the benefits of trade that are common among market economies clearly illustrate that interdependence is a crucial aspect of capitalist societies. In fact, self-sufficiency is a characteristic of socialist groups - all of whom want to run their own farm with their own this and that. Similarly the socialist and communist nations wanted to wall themselves off so that they only produce for themselves inside their borders what they want and so on.
Also what's all this about the body that never breaks. We have insurance schemes because there is uncertainty about the human body. What are annuities? Contract law allows for exemptions for acts of god like if a hurricane hits you.
Listen, this person's life sucks. And it's important that society not abandon them. But that doesn't mean they can talk nonsense. This kind of suffering theology where we believe someone whose life is hard has access to some deep truth has no basis in reality. In fact, I'd argue that their thought is far more likely to be disordered.
I mean... I'm sure it's not easy being a disabled artist but this feels a lot like undeservedly blaming the rest of society.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
This is a very sad story, especially on the health side.
But rhe fact they keep going on about capitalism demonstrates their main problem. In reality we don't live in capitalism or neoliberalism, but a space where government legislation and taxation determines most things, and if you think more of the same is going to magically solve things, you've been sold a pup. It's hard to start a business (capitalism) mainly because of government economic control.
At best we have a situation where the top companies and government have converged with one another and co-operate whether through the World Economic Forum or otherwise.
The digital ID thing we see just now is driven by governments worldwide.
The site is full of people, who believe in capitalism like a religion, slave their life to labour while being paid enough to feel good and better than others.
And plenty of tankies striving for a communist utopia, fully convinced the 140 million lives their ideology has cost so far is a small price to pay for entry into their stalinist paradise.
Yeah it's one or the other...the communist, the enemies, the infidels, it's a blind ideology, almost dogmatic, but that is exactly what is needed to slave labor millions..same folks talking about AI/robotics automating all the value creation preaching capitalism which is clearly unsustainable economical arrangement.
But anyway, you are clearly one of the people I'm describing.. unfortunately, it is unsustainable system both from an economical and environmental perspectives. And I won't argue about mental health, which you would probably label as lazy commie or something.
Are you excited to go to Mars? like heaven but for capitalist?
I wonder where did you get that 140 million figure.
Ffs, this whole thread is just full of toxic positivity as far as I'm concerned.
The reality of it is that the reason why it hurts is you're essentially being kept alive artificially. As at any other time period you'd have just starved to death or died to freezing a winter or two later, putting an end to the misery.
Can you still have fun moments and learn to live your life as a glorified leech? Sure, a lot of people do so, and our society has decided that's for the best.
And in case you or someone else has an issue with the term leech here I'm going to be extra clear: you need to face reality to get over this pain. Accept what you have been forced to become. Then you can make an effort to life with your lot in life, and potentially find acceptance to the cards you've been dealt.
Probably wasn't your fault and almost certainly unfair, but that's just how life is
I'm very sorry to read of the author's experiences; a permanent disability can be a terrible thing to have to live with.
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
It’s sad to see people in the thread conflate capitalist greed with the “Protestant work ethic.” Despite the popularity of prosperity gospel teaching in the US, Jesus’ actual teachings clearly condemn greed and oppression of those who have less. A work ethic is still valuable, because goods have to be produced, but the reason we can’t solve worldwide poverty by just writing a check is that oppressive leaders at some point in the chain will use that money to enrich themselves, or they will take it from those who can’t defend themselves.
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.
"Ye cannot serve God and mammon"
Find a Church which still does this:
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.