Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, together, richer than the half of the population of the United States. Bezos was the fortunate recipient of an abrupt surge in the value of Amazon stock that has given him a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. Which makes this comment particularly appropriate:
One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.”
There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.
The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.
It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.
I don’t mind some inequities in wealth — I buy into capitalism just enough to think that a motivating reward system for human behavior is a good thing — but we’re well beyond what is fair or reasonable. I can live with some people making a million dollars a year, but only if we’re also making sure that no one has to live in rank poverty. But someone “earning” billions while huge numbers can barely keep food on the table, can’t afford rent, can’t go to a doctor when they need to, and their children have no opportunities for a good education…that is an obscenity.
Yes, this seems like an easy concept to unify the left — really anything center and left: So long as there are people in our society unable to meet their basic needs (nutrition, health care, shelter, education…), it is immoral to have wealth in excess of one’s own needs, with the degree of immorality proportional to the amount of excess wealth.
We all benefit from exploitation on some level, certain people way more than others.
Reminds me of this article from Current Affairs: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-immoral-to-be-rich
The system will be reset. History says that much. How society deals with social parasites still has time for creative intervention before things get violent, but that window will not be open forever.
If the argument applies to Bezos, it also applies to a great many professional sports players.
While the quote is interesting, how much you earn is not directly related to those attributes (intelligence, effort, etc.), but rather to supply and demand. Low-paying jobs are low paying mainly because there are a lot of people who can do the job, but not a lot of demand (eg. lots of people could be servers at restaurants, but there is a limited number of server jobs available); while some jobs are high-paying because there is a demand for them, but only a few people qualified to do them (eg. neurosurgeon). While I agree that servers should be paid a living wage, and tipping abolished (exploitation of a vulnerable system), I don’t see neurosurgeons wages as stealing.
However in terms of billionaires I would like to see some evidence of exploitation or stealing. If I were to develop an app or wrote a song for digital download, put it on sale online for a reasonable price, and enough people paid for it for me to earn a billion dollars (eg. 1 billion downloads at $1 each, or 100 million at $10/each), how would that be stealing or exploitation?
@6 Michael: You’ve seriously never heard any examples of how Amazon, GEICO, or Microsoft have been exploiting anyone? Or are you saying you know of some other billionaire you think is exempt from such things?
would you also like to see evidence of Trump lying, perchance?
LOL
You haven’t thought this through far enough. What you earn (several $10,000s) makes you the equivalent of a Jeff Bezos compared to millions of Indians. So why should he have to cap his wealth at what you believe to be an appropriate maximum?
To OP
Absolutely agreed.
It’s almost as though, despite being principles at the very heart of the one true
faitheconomic system, the concepts of ‘earning’ and ‘deserving’ have no meaning beyond whatever best serves the interests of the powerful at the precise moment they are being used. That being the case, it’s entirely possible to a ‘earn’ billion or ten dollars, in the same way that it’s possible to flurgle a vast fortune (amusingly, a brief internet search reveals that ‘flurgle’ does, in fact, have several better-defined meanings than ‘earning’ or ‘deserving’). I could go on……or I could just quote from one of my favorite books (again):
From The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Also, Prof Myers I believe that you are an Amazon affiliate? Who links to products from this blog using hyperlinks that earn money for both Mr. Bezos and yourself if the clicker buys from them? I don’t see how this circle can be squared.
To Dave Grain
I’ll answer for myself.
I am a utilitarian, closely following the path laid out by John Stuart Mill, and I’m especially fond of the Veil Of Ignorance utilitarian standard of John Rawls. In short, the Veil Of Ignorance standard states that we ought to judge society A vs society B by assuming that we would be born into a random place in that society, random in the sense of random sex, gender, skin color, disability, parent’s economic status, geographic location, etc.
I’m also a card-carrying radical Marxist. I believe that property is violence, often a necessary violence, but violence none-the-less. Take a moment to examine what property rights actually is and actually entails. A claim to ownership of land is the promise that if anyone uses that land against the wishes of the declared owner, then violence will be visited upon the transgressor. For example, the threat “get off my land or I’ll call the cops”. The violence will escalate as the transgression extends. Eventually, a man with a gun (a cop) will come to stop the transgression.
Property is based on threats (and other social coercion). There is no metaphysical connection between a land-owner and their land. There’s no magical string that connects them. Land ownership (and other forms of property) is a societal convention that is enforced by violence and other coercion.
Some people, often libertarians, are ideologically wed to the labor theory of property. I’ll tear that apart if you wish, but I suggest the standard tracts on this topic for an intro.
So, to summarize, I’m a utilitarian, and property is a cultural fiction. In other words, there is no starting moral precept that says “we should defend property rights”. Rather, I believe that some limited form of property rights are a means to an end.
A limited form of property rights are essential to having a happy life – you cannot live a happy life if you have no personal belongings at all, if you do not have a guaranteed and personalized and personal and private place of shelter from the rain and elements, etc.
Crucially for this conversation, a limited form of property rights are also essential to the generation of material wealth. Material wealth primarily comes from capitalism, and particularly the specialization of labor. Specialization of labor is only practical when combined with a system of markets where goods and labor can be traded. This market system requires a limited form of property. However, absolute property rights are not required in order to sustain a practical market system in order to sustain specialization of labor.
In particular, I am in favor of like 99% or higher tax rates on inheritance on the filthy rich. I’m also in favor of like 90% or higher tax rates on income on the filthy rich. I’m also in favor of very high tax rates on assets on the filthy rich. Why? Because a free society and democracy cannot survive when there are massive power differences between members in society, and money is power, and today there are massive money differences aka power differences. We need an express wealth redistribution system in order to reduce the power inequality in order to preserve our free society.
We can have wealth redistribution systems, while also having enough private property to enable trade markets, in order to enable specialization of labor, in order to foster the creation of material wealth. They’re not inconsistent, despite the bleating protestations of libertarians. The particular tax policies that I’ve laid out would have only minimal impact on the functioning of our economy, and our society at large would reap enormous benefits.
OK, lets make YOU show evidence of positive. That Amazon, Wamart, etc., are paying both providing every job as full time with benefits, and are telling Congress to raise the minimum wage….
I’m not holding my breath.
Nerd,
Please use a name or number when quoting, it is very hard to follow you otherwise.
To answer your comment: the request for evidence was made. You do not then get to use a schoolyard retort of “you first” in response. Asshat.
Michael:
How much of that billion dollars would you still have after taxes? I’m not going to pretend this is anything like a realistic scenario, but presumably there would also be at least some costs to take into account. Anyway, somehow, we just have you interacting single-handedly with some large number of faceless customers, ready to hand you cash (which is supposed to be useful for something) in exchange for goods/services you produce. Where did they and their money come from? Where did your knowledge and ability to produce those things come from? It doesn’t yet feel like a world with political/economic/justice systems, with people, history, culture and all the rest. It’s not a place where anybody actually lives, so why ask about it?
I don’t know what PZ is talking about with regard to capitalism being “a motivating reward system for human behavior.” I think it’s probably just a load of bullshit, although it’s hard to know what the fuck that’s even about. But let’s suppose you have your billion dollars, Michael. You “earned” that money, in the sense that you sold stuff at what is supposed to be a “reasonable price,” so that somehow or another you ended up with that amount in your bank account. (If not banks, imagine lots of mattresses under which you can store piles of cash.)
Okay, you’ve somehow got that stuff. There are important questions which are not so much about your actions, but about why we as a society have invented money, what we aim to accomplish with our invention as we continue to use it, and so forth. What fucking good did it do, if there are people living in poverty, while you have horded tons of stuff, by making an app, writing a song, or by doing whatever else? Our society doesn’t benefit from it, if we have an end result like that. If you don’t think that’s clear, we should work through that conclusion first.
Certain rich people might actually think that not only do they own their one billion dollars, but that in some sense they can also claim (explicitly or not) a right to our whole society — it’s all theirs for the taking. Whatever beneficial effect there may be should rightfully go to them (they think), not to everybody in our society. Why are the rest of us left out of the picture? I don’t think we should be, but they do tell themselves fairy tales about what they personally did, what they “earned” as individuals, etc., which rather cavalierly ignore everything else in the entire world. They apparently just don’t give a shit about how their lives/careers/etc. fit into the larger picture. The whole economy (not just this transaction or that one) works well for them, which is supposed to be enough to make it at least an adequate system. That’s when they’re ready to stop asking any more hard questions about it, because they’re comfortable enough to do so.
They’ll even tell themselves they’re not exploiting anybody or anything, when it’s abundantly clear that they have more than they could possibly need while others don’t have enough. But of course that’s bullshit. If this isn’t a system which makes it possible to run our collective house fairly, reasonably, efficiently, etc., then such people are taking advantage of it, which is just to say they are exploiting it and us for personal gain. I don’t know what kind of evidence you think you still need for this sort of statement — I could easily give you evidence that there are people living in poverty, for instance. So, if we also have your (imagined) evidence of possessing one billion dollars, the problem is apparently not a lack of evidence but that you’re not following through on the reasoning which connects these things together.
consciousness razor:
“Certain rich people might actually think that not only do they own their one billion dollars, but that in some sense they can also claim (explicitly or not) a right to our whole society — it’s all theirs for the taking. Whatever beneficial effect there may be should rightfully go to them (they think), not to everybody in our society. Why are the rest of us left out of the picture? I don’t think we should be, but they do tell themselves fairy tales about what they personally did, what they “earned” as individuals, etc., which rather cavalierly ignore everything else in the entire world. ”
The fuck? You went from what some rich people might be thinking to giving detailed scenarios of what definitely goes on in their heads within two sentences.
Well, that escalated quickly.
To consciousness razor
IMO, the obvious interpretation is that PZ is making one or both of the following well-accepted points:
1- Consider a hypothetical “utopia” where people have no societal incentive to work, and people are free to just take stuff from the local government storehouse for free, and some people work just because they want to, in order to supply that local government storehouse. It won’t work, because not enough people would work out of the goodness of their heart. The system would collapse.
2- In a particular kind of communism, the state pays everyone according to their station. In this system, innovation is generally not well rewarded (monetarily), and people off can slack off on the job in various ways while receiving the same pay. People lack the sort of incentives that they would have in a typical capitalist approach in order to produce a good quality product, to put in a full day’s work, and to innovate, etc. Consequently, this sort of system tends to do very badly relative to a properly regulated capitalism economy.
I agree with the gist of the comment, but nothing is always absolutely so. Take the case of Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft. Perfectly average guy, made an insanely popular video game and sold it to Microsoft for two and a half billion dollars. We can argue over how much of that money is moral for him to keep, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that he didn’t earn it without “leveraging corrupt systems or exploiting people.”
Thank you for calling yourself what you are. Put up or shut up. Showing evidence first makes YOUR arguments better. Showing none, you show the old saying “that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. You are dismissed. Bye-bye.
I hate it when my fellow serfs believe that they are princes temporarily short on cash, and begging for all serfs to get whipped a little harder. Worked a little harder.
Dave Grain:
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
#5: how much you earn is not directly related to those attributes (intelligence, effort, etc.), but rather to supply and demand. Low-paying jobs are low paying mainly because there are a lot of people who can do the job, but not a lot of demand (eg. lots of people could be servers at restaurants, but there is a limited number of server jobs available); while some jobs are high-paying because there is a demand for them, but only a few people qualified to do them (eg. neurosurgeon).
Earnings are a function of many factors; some are inherent, others imposed. Inherent factors alone (intelligence, drive, determination) cannot and do not account for the extreme income inequality of today [PZ’s discussion]. Imposed factors (essentially policy) amplify and further deepen inequality. For example, supply/demand of some marketable skills is regulated by government policy or professional membership – requirement of law school graduation to practice law: some motivated self-learners are capable of passing the Bar Exam; teacher certification: college professors have the knowledge to teach grades k-12 yet cannot be hired for those jobs due to lack of teacher certification; electricians, trade skills which can be learned on the job yet require additional certification to practice trade such as plumbing, electrician, mechanic. Policy also plays a large role in the affordability/accessibility of training to obtain these skills/certificates. Of the imposed factors, policies which control information have the greatest effect of income inequality – this includes intellectual information (copyrights, patents, proprietary information, trade secrets), state secrets (military/spy spending), and industry secrets (market dumping, waste dumping).
Public chatter about ‘free markets’ is all nonsense; all markets are controlled by the people who control information; in the U.S., consumers have don’t have much choice of ethical consumption due to lack of information and minimum selection.
Possibly the closest thing to free market economies are the self-organizing markets of refuge camps before they are subject to imposed rules (just a guess ’cause I am not an economist). A much better example/metaphor would be the water economy of terrestrial ecosystems… follow the movement of water from environment (atmospheric, terrestrial) to primary producers… all the way up to apex predator. Capitalism operates along the same principles of a predator-prey food chain. But simple predator-prey food chains are not stable. Ecological food webs are more stable and resilient than simple predator-prey food chains because of highly integrated and complex biological/ecological interactions, among them, predation, mutualism, commensalism and parasitism. An economy or system that allows a small number of individuals to control information concentrates power (a function of wealth) in those individuals. A system that broadly disseminates information is less susceptible to attempts to concentrate power.
Who gets to determine and draw the “enough is enough” line?
Nerd,
The OP included a quote which said “There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.”
The person you quoted said “However in terms of billionaires I would like to see some evidence of exploitation”.
I do not know how to make this any clearer, in a way you might understand. You are a spectacular fucking moron.
Zeppelin: I am not clicking on a link to a strange sounding website. Can you describe it?
I don’t think it is unreasonable to point out that criticizing Jeff Bezos while simultaneously promoting Google for one’s own gain is hypocritical.
Dave Grain: I don’t think you can embed images in posts, so a link is the best I can do.
It’s a cartoon, about a guy who thinks “you participate in [thing] even though you criticise [thing]” is a clever gotcha. I felt it was topical.
Dave Grain:
I don’t understand what your problem is. We can try to explain their behavior in all sorts of ways in all sorts of different circumstance. Feel free to propose alternative explanations if you like. However, independently of whatever is actually going on in their heads, they are being exploitative. If you’re going to disagree with that, then you should explain why.
EL:
I don’t get it. People would still need food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, and so forth. Those things would ultimately come from somewhere, and I’m guessing we shouldn’t be imagining it’s just magically appearing in “the local government storehouse” or whatever. We do have incentives because of the kind of entities we are: human beings. That kind of thing doesn’t need to be imposed by a society, and I don’t get what you think would be collapsing if our society failed somehow to incentivize it via capitalistic institutions and the like.
Except for the communism part, that sounds like every job I’ve ever had. In my experience, even when it comes to volunteer efforts, there are some people who work a lot harder/better than others, and it’s unfortunate that they often go unrecognized.
But the point is, if our capitalistic system doesn’t even come closely accomplishing this either, then I wouldn’t mention it as a selling point in favor of capitalism. Because it isn’t one.
That may be one thing capitalism is supposed to promise, but I’m not going to take it as a given just because somebody out there says so. Christianity also promises salvation, yet here we are, not trying to derive any serious conclusions from that bullshit.
centralpede@19: why do you think Microsoft has $2.5 billion to spend on acquiring Minecraft? This is what people don’t get about exploitation. Nobody’s saying Persson ran a dungeon of peons whom he whipped for code. But the only reason he made $2.5 billion is because of the vast wealth accumulated by Microsoft, much of it through intellectual property theft, market manipulation, anti-trust behaviours, mistreatment of non-core workers, and on and on.
edit:
Thank you troll, you showed your true self. Same as any creobot/godbot. We know how billionaires got their money my cheating people, with low wages, no advancement, not enough hours, and no benefits. Search. Do YOUR do diligence to convince the regulars you are anything other than a troll. I was a scientist for 40 years, so I know where the burden of evidence lies. Upon You. Can you show us honesty and integrity, or just ignorant tap dancing like so far.
To consciousness razor
I’m not sure how to respond to that. Let me try.
Would they? I’m sure that the millions of people that starved to death from mass famine from poor government regulation of the economy would be glad to know that they didn’t actually starve to death. /s
Left to their own devices, humans will try to produce what they need, and invariably they will also set up a barter and trade system, which leads to a specialization of labor, e.g. proto-capitalism. No one needs to force or incentivize humans to do this. They’ll do it spontaneously.
PZ’s comment, IMO, should be understood in the context of cartoony communism. Cartoony communism, such as during the great famines of North Korea, forbid people from bartering and trading. Instead of the natural evolution to proto-capitalism, all people are expected to work in their government appointed jobs, where the work is directed in a top-down approach, with government quotas for output, etc. This generally results in incredibly poor quality in the products being produced.
For example, there’s plenty of stories from the old Soviet Union where factories would produce parts in order to meet their quota, but every single part was deficient and unusuable for the intended purpose, and obviously so even to a cursory visual examination.
The reasons for why this happens so often in a cartoony communist system are several, and I won’t try to explain why right now. I’ll simply note that this is a brute fact of history.
In a typical capitalist setup, that shit would be discovered far sooner by the buyer of the parts, and the supplier would go out of business. In a typical capitalist setup, it wouldn’t even get that far, because the owner of the manufacturing facility knows that he won’t find any buyers if their parts have insufficient quality, and therefore he’ll employ managers and workers who also understand this, and there will be created a culture in the facility to prevent this from happening. The capitalist approach is not immune to quality problems, etc. – obviously – but as history shows, the capitalist approach has way way better outcomes compared to cartoony communism where the government imposes quotas on factories instead of factories producing according to demand in a market.
Typically, people attribute a particular reason for the failure of cartoony communism, and that is the removal of immediate and direct “incentives” for the workers to produce quality goods (and to innovate, etc.). More often in a cartoony communist system, the incentives that a worker faces to produce quality good is more removed and indirect and less immediate compared to the incentives that a worker faces in a typical capitalist system.
This is really basic stuff. I would think that you already know this, and that you take it for granted. I’m really confused right now why it seems that you don’t already know this stuff – or at least why you’re not familiar with the standard talking points that I’m regurgitating.
PS:
Like, were you being facetious when you said that you didn’t understand what PZ was talking about in the OP with that one line? I’m sorry, I thought you were asking an honest question. If instead you are familiar with the standard capitalist talking points, and you were just questioning the truth of those talking points, then I misunderstood you. My apologies. Having said that, if this is what you were doing, that was very far from clear.
EnlightenmentLiberal@13: “A claim to ownership of land is the promise that if anyone uses that land against the wishes of the declared owner, then violence will be visited upon the transgressor.”
I believe that is an exaggerated view of land ownership. I live in Sweden, where there is the right to roam. I can go onto someone’s land, camp there overnight, pick berries, and more – within limits, of course. The cops will not enforce the landowner’s simple desire to not have me on the land.
Even in the US there isn’t an absolute property right making the landowner an absolute monarch over their personal fiefdom. I give the Swedish example to show that what might be considered a fundamental property right against trespass isn’t actually universal.
I agree that “Land ownership (and other forms of property) is a societal convention that is enforced by violence and other coercion” — society itself is a convention enforced by coercion. Land ownership is no more special than forming your own club and holding meetings, where you as organizer also have a limited right to ask the police to enforce your club rules, and potentially doing so with violence. Freedom of association requires the potential for violence, yes?
I believe that under your logic that means that a club, like property, is violence. But if everything is violence, then perhaps that’s not a useful way to describe things?
Enlightenment Liberal: that’s certainly a cartoony version of communism — in reality, the Soviet Union managed to mobilise its industry so efficiently that it made more tanks than the rest of the world combined in WW2, and their T-34 was the best tank in existence for the first half of the war. Zeiss routinely produced the world’s best lenses despite being based in East Germany for the entirety of the GDR’s communist rule.
On the other hand, many of our capitalist manufacturing utopias are currently wracked by scandals where major companies have sold products that are fraudulently not up to contracted standards, sometimes putting people’s lives at risk (e.g. Takata airbags). In some cases (e.g. Volkswagen), the companies didn’t just fail to meet production standards and cover it up to protect their supply chain, they knowingly conspired to cheat emissions standards and mislead regulators from the outset. Where was the great capitalist quality guarantee when Chisso Corporation dumped mercury into Minimata Bay? Where was the great capitalist quality guarantee in Bhopal? If you don’t want to talk about mass disasters, where was the capitalist guarantee when Samsung made its exploding phones — or its incendiary washing machines?
Perhaps. Contrary to many here, I still think it’s useful. I think it’s a very useful way because it makes people think about the injustice inherent in the system that permits a small number of people to near-monopolize the use of large swathes of land and other property. Many people live shitty lives because they have to respect the property rights of the filthy rich, or suffer the consequences of violence of the state via their enforcers, the police.
Particularly, I think it’s useful when engaging with a libertarian. I agree with the libertarian view that violation of the libertarian non-aggression principle is violence. I totally grant that rhetorical move. I totally grant that taxes are violence. For example, if I don’t pay may taxes for long enough, and If I’m clever enough in avoiding tax collection, eventually a man will come to my house to a gun to put me in a cage.
IMO, the proper reply to the libertarian is to argue that sometimes the morally correct decision is to violate the non-aggression principle, and to use preemptive force on others when the subject of the force has previously wronged someone else by particular action, or even inaction.
In other words, I think it’s useful to dispel this ridiculous notion that we can live violence free. Our life will always be filled with violence. We ought to try to minimize it (subject to other needs, like material wealth), but we can never rid ourselves of violence, and in this absolute meaning, it would be foolish to try to remove all violence. This pipedream of removing all violence is IMO the foundation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle, and this philosophically naive pipedream needs to die. We’re all morally responsible to each other in some ways, and we should use force, post-hoc force and preemptive force, to ensure compliance. I agree that this is what society is. Society is, in part, the use of force to ensure that people obey certain societal norms for the betterment of everyone in society.
Ack, I didn’t proofread enough.
Corrections:
* eventually, a man with a gun will come to my house to put me in a cage.
* to use preemptive force on others when the subject of the force has not previously wronged someone else by particular action, or even inaction.
No, how much you are PAID is related to supply and demand. Whether what you EARN and what you are PAID are consistent is exactly what is in question here.
To chrislawson
Seriously – I was legitimately just trying to be useful, helpful, by explaining what I thought was the obvious meaning of what PZ wrote. I had no intention to defend PZ’s point. I just tried to make it clear to consciousness razor. I do happen to agree with the point, but I’d rather not defend it here. If you really push me to defend it, let me ask you the simple question: How do you feel about technocracies, and centrally planned economies, where barter and trade are outlawed, and a central planning agency directs and provides quotes for all economic activity? Do you think that this is better than a properly regulated capitalist system, what some Europeans (AFAIK) call social democracy? To the extent that I understand the term, I also describe myself as a social democrat.
whheydt,
Athletes are labor. Some of them are spectacularly (even obscenely) well-paid labor, but they are labor nonetheless, which means that for every athlete earning a large salary there is someone earning several times more. Also keep in mind that the earning life of an athlete is short–most are washed up by the time they’re 40–and they’re just one major injury away from being tossed away. Athletes are easy and highly-visible targets, but they’re not the problem.
I don’t know if CEO’s who get multiple $100 millions a year plus stock options are included in the billionaires club but it would not take very many years of such compensation to accumulate that kind of wealth. I have always enjoyed the justification stories that go along with them as some very bold fiction. Funny how the majority of the profits end up not going the the shop floor, the back office nor the sales, order and shipping personal.
uncle frogy
I don’t really think of it in the same way as I’d think of someone actually having $1 billion or more in liquid assets, or earning that much pay in a year. It’s mostly Amazon stock, and that only translates into liquid money that he can spend if he can borrow against or sell it (and he realistically can’t do that with more than a percentage of the stock, because it would undermine his position at the company and raise questions about Amazon’s prospects, tanking the value of the stock).
As long as you have private ownership of companies denominated in shares that can be traded and sold, you’re going to get people with substantial net worth just cause they happened to be one of the founders of the company.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
Minor nitpick, but it’s more like an informal “credit” economy that emerges, at least from what I remember of David Graeber’s anthropological writings on the origin of money. People do you favors with the expectation that you’ll do them favors, and if you don’t you come under severe social pressure and sanction for not keeping up the reciprocation. The slightly more sophisticated version of this was situations like early 18th century England, where hard currency was in somewhat scarce supply so people just had constant “tabs” and debts with each other that they’d occasionally settle.
chrislawson @35:
This is untrue. The Soviet Union produced only slightly more tanks than the US did, but Soviet tanks including the T-34 were notable for their poor quality on multiple levels: they were cramped, their optics were bad, their steering was extremely hard to operate and quickly fatigued the driver (on top of having terrible ergonomics), their armor was relatively thin for a medium tank, they lacked radios, and they often were so poorly put together that there were visible gaps in the armor where they should have been welded. Their actual advantages were that their had such strongly sloped armor that German anti-tank guns tended to be deflected rather than penetrating and their diesel engines meant that they were more reliable in extremely cold weather than the gasoline powered German tanks. And the Soviets managed to produce about twice as many of them as all of Germany’s tanks combined.
The T-34 was in fact quite inferior to the M4 Sherman line, despite the Sherman’s (undeserved) bad reputation.
smellyoldgit@#22:
Who gets to determine and draw the “enough is enough” line
I’m game.
Joking aside, why is that considered a hard problem? Just draw a line and say “there’s enough.”
Interesting algorithm: as long as a significant percentage of people on the low side of the line say it’s too low, keep raising it. (Slightly Rawlesian)
Ps: $10m. That was easy. Nobody needs more than $10m.
I dunno, who does it now and how is that going?
Cap every employee’s compensation at a maximum of 100 times the lowest salary of any of the firm’s common-law employees, less that employee’s investment income.
EL:
I’m not arguing that we’d be okay if there were “poor government regulation of the economy.” How you got there is totally beyond me.
Leaving aside a few nitpicks, it sounds like you more or less agree with what I said, and this is just your strange way of conceding the point. If you don’t believe giving a shit about others (and sharing, cooperating, etc.) is in contradiction with these very basic facts about human beings, that doing so would not cause total societal collapse, then I don’t think you have a point to make anymore.
I’m being very sincere when I say it’s hard to make sense of what you (and/or PZ) might have been thinking. This is a slightly fanciful version of how the dialogue went:
X: Why should there be inequality? Why should it exist to some degree, which is supposed to be considered “fair” despite the fact that it’s unequal, supposed to be “reasonable” even though the reason for it (if any) is far from obvious?
Y: Because otherwise, I can only imagine a hypothetical situation in which people would be unmotivated, since that is what people must be without capitalism. They would lack some kind of reward, which I think is provided by capitalism and not by anything else. (How people managed to get by for countless centuries prior to such developments is a total mystery.) They’d just be a bunch of lazy, stupid, myopic, do-nothing communists, asking for handouts while watching society collapse around them.
X: Well, that sounds like a pretty fucking extreme consequence to me, but I don’t believe it. People may be motivated to work because they are hungry, for instance, and they will use their pay to purchase food. It’s not as if they would no longer require food to survive, if our society decided to ensure everybody was treated fairly enough to at least guarantee they’ll have the food they need. It’s not as if they would suddenly fail to realize that these things they need don’t just appear magically in a commercial store (or a government warehouse or whatever) without human intervention, because it obviously requires a lot of work to produce those things and get them to the people who need them.
Y: Cartoons.
Do you get why I’m not very satisfied with your responses?
Pretty simple concept: our actual reality is that some individuals have at least tens of thousands of times more access to resources (or power, or money) than the average person, and thereby can accrue even more far more quickly than the average person.
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Their personal needs are certainly not are certainly not tens of thousands of times more than those of the average person (one can indulge one’s physical appetites only so much!), and (significantly) they are certainly not tens of thousands of times more personally puissant than the average person.
Another aspect of our actual reality is that I think it very arguable that, were global resources to be distributed differently (pretty sure the technology and logistics are surmountable with a bit of will), the outcome of the rich still being vastly rich and the physically poor (the ones who starve or die of preventable diseases etc) still being only resource-poor but now able to subsist without needless physical suffering is achievable.
I (being one) am pretty sure the average person would vote ‘Yes’ to the proposition that personal wealth be capped at a mere 10,000 times the average wage.
Point of all this being that I think that anyone who considers the way things are right now to be equitable is either stupid or motivated.
—
Anyway. Futile aspirational idealism aside, and to forestall:
The argument that there will always be a 0.01% in any population is indisputable, but not relevant to the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the shape of the probability distribution.
[Azkyroth, my comment was independent of yours, FWTW :) ]
@35:
Not just currently, there’s a long and ghastly history of manufacturers flagrantly disregarding the health and safety of their customers and employees for the sake of padding their profits. Market demand did little to stop it; rather it took government regulation stepping in and forcing manufacturers to consider people as more than just an expendable source of income.
I’m talking factory workers being lied to about the safety of their working conditions and then suppressed when they sought restitution for significant health conditions directly related to their work environment. Being burned to death in uncontrollable fires (fueled by a glut of flammable materials) because exits and fire escapes were ordered to be locked, if they existed at all. Children being maimed or killed by toys advertised as safe, sometimes with even the most basic safety features restricted to more expensive models of the same toy. Poisonings from medicines crafted with a bigger mind to flavor and marketability than whether or not the ingredients are actually safe. Companies spreading propaganda against safer alternatives and outright lying about the safety of their own products. This doesn’t even count environmental impacts as a casualty.
Sometimes market influence simply doesn’t exist–it’s hard to pick and choose when there’s only one option avaiable, or when they’re all shit. Relying on the market to regulate itself also requires that people be hurt or killed in order to figure out which options to choose from. Worst of it all, you still get people who prefer to blame the victims for their own injury rather than take the manufacturers to task, some bizarre social darwinistic philosophy where children victimized by products marketed to them with the promise of safety somehow deserved to be maimed and killed, as though it’s foolish to expect some basic responsibility of companies to the people who produce and buy their goods to not blatantly lie about whether or not their products will actually kill them. I mean, yeah, buyer beware, but there’s a limit.
And the fact that there are folks around who want to go back to the good ol’ days of deregulation, who think that it’s a crime that manufacturers be forced to consider human beings as more valuable than their profits, that it’s their inalienable right to get rich off the backs of people they directly maimed and killed, and that there’s nothing to worry about because the market will regulate safety and compassion into itself (which means that if it doesn’t, then it was the consumer’s fault)… It all makes me sick, really.
I’m speaking generally, not targeting anyone here. I guess this was a rant more than a point of argument. So many have forgotten that regulations often have a death toll behind them. Or they simply don’t care. It makes me sad.
To consciousness razor
You’ve helped a lot. In particular, this next bit that I am quoting was really helpful for me to better understand.
Again, this helped me a lot, thanks.
I think it’s basically impossible to have a society where one can “pay” for food without having wealth inequality. The very ability to trade possessions for other possessions will necessarily lead to wealth inequality. Even if you magically reset everyone to equal at the start, every trade by physical necessity will not be exactly equal, which means that some people will start to accrue more than others, which will give them advantages in future trading, which will slowly start to cause more and more concentrations of wealth.
Tangent: I suppose that if you have a giant reset button that you hit periodically, like redistributing all wealth every 2 months, then you don’t have this issue as a cumulative effect in the long term, but at the end of each period just before the reset, there will be people with more and people with less. Regardless, I don’t think anyone here was seriously suggesting such a system, and I think it’s completely unworkable, and it can be safely ignored.
PZ Myers and I are talking about a very specific alternative to capitalism. Imagine we had a society where everyone was guaranteed, by law, free food, housing, internet, with absolutely no strings attached. In that society, many people would choose to no longer work, and they would become a drain on society. I think there’s a good chance that the people who do choose to voluntarily work will become resentful, and more will choose to not work, and it might even lead to open fighting and revolution. I think this sort of system is dynamically unstable – it will not remain as-is for very long.
Tangent: Yet, a big part of me also wants to say that food, shelter, and basic internet access should be considered basic human rights. I have a seeming contradiction, which is a huge difficulty to resolve for me personally. I don’t have a fully satisfactory answer, but I have a general idea of the shape of the answer, which depends heavily on the brute scientific facts of the specific details on the relationship between the level of motivation to work for the typical person and how it’s related to the level of personal wealth (like in actual dollar amounts). In short, until the creation of Star Trek replicators and strong AI, the solution has to be some amount of withholding government handouts in order to make life miserable for people who can work but choose not to. Even still, I believe that the facts permit our society to give free food and shelter even to those who are clearly leeching, and this is a small cost to pay in order to guarantee that innocent people do not go hungry or without shelter.
This is the bit that I still don’t understand:
It seems like you’re just ducking and ignoring the free-rider problem. Again, imagine a society whereby people are guaranteed free access to food, shelter, internet, and other amenities, with no strings attached. I agree that in order for this system to be sustained, someone needs to do the work. However, very few people will want to do the work. Many people will choose to leech off the system, and the system will quickly collapse, as described by the tragedy of the commons, a class of phenomena that is closely related to the free-rider problem. Such a system cannot survive for long.
We need people to do work, and most people won’t do work unless there’s pressure on them to do work. Personal hunger and desire for stuff is a really effective kind of pressure to do work, but if society provides a guarantee of free food, shelter, and more, enough for a good standard of living, then you’re going to greatly decrease the motivation of most people to work. At least, the motivation of people to work will remain as long as the free handouts remain, which won’t be long until the system implodes.
I think this is a core part of what PZ and I were trying to say. Are you with me thus far?
I think there’s a little more that was meant to be communicated; specifically the facts that cartoony communist systems, such as some eras of the Soviet Union and North Korea, simply perform far worse than typical market systems, and many people believe this failing happens due to a lack of proper incentives on the workers and management to produce useful and quality goods compared to the incentives that workers and management have in a typical market system to produce useful and quality goods.
…
PS:
To John
Well said.
To brett in 42
Sure, sounds good. Thanks for the correction.
EnlightenmentLiberal,
Very much depends on how you define “to do work”.
You know any hobbyists?
(Alternatively: the parable of Tom Sawyer and the Painted Fence)
microraptor: my apologies, I miscalculated the tank production numbers. But still, the point I was trying to make was that the Soviet Union managed major industrial activity when it needed to, and it put out a lot of serviceable tanks.
As for the quality of the T-34, sure it wasn’t built as well as the other WW2 tanks, but it had a number of advantages. One you mentioned was the sloping front, but it also had a small profile making it a smaller target, and for the style of warfare the Soviets was going for it was better than a brilliantly engineered tank because they could pump out thousands of them cheap and fast. This was especially evident when the Soviets built the mechanically superior T-44 but only made a tiny number because it was smarter to keep pumping out the T-34s (admittedly with bigger guns).
Also, the Sherman didn’t see action until 1942 (…ie. the second half of the war).
And finally, in the latter stages of the war, the recurring story of the Eastern front was Soviet tank units breaking the line of German tank units. Over and over again. With their supposedly awful T-34s up against the supposedly superior Panzers.
And the Soviets managed to do all this while at the same time uprooting their entire industrial complex and moving it east of the Urals.
So I apologise for the error, but the point remains that the Soviets managed to use industrialisation very effectively when it suited Stalin’s political needs. I’m not saying this to defend Stalinism, but just to argue against the simplistic communism-means-industrial-incompetence-while-capitalism-means-industrial-brilliance meme.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
Didn’t the Dauphin experiment show a minimal impact on work incentivization, with most of the folks choosing to drop hours being mothers who wanted to spend more time taking care of their kids, and teenagers who chose to continue their education in lieu of working? And that folks took advantage of the security to spend more time seeking out better work?
It also seemed to show a significant positive impact on physical and mental health, if the reduced hospital and psychiatric consultations are anything to go by.
Imagine: a musician makes an album, and earns a dollar for every copy sold. If a million copies are sold, the musician becomes a millionaire. Is that money fairly earned? Depends. If the copies are produced in a factory where workers do not make enough money to make a decent living, then I’d say no, not at all.
In reality, millionaires almost always become millionaires over the backs of others. And as EnlightenmentLiberal pointed out, money is power, and millionaires have more resources to remain the status quo or even make things worse. In a free and democratic society, this is unacceptable.
“The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.”
You can’t compare stocks and flows. The poverty threshold is an income, the billion dollars is wealth.
Consumption inequality is a problem, up to a point. We should make sure that everyone has enough to get by. Wealth inequality is at best irrelevant and at worst an active distraction from real problems.
@Enlightenment Liberal:
consciousness razor and probably everyone else understands what you’re saying. What they (and I) disagree with is the fact that you think the vast majority of people will not want to do any work to maintain society. I don’t see why you would think that.
The vast majority of people on welfare are on it for a short time until they are able to find work, etc. The majority of people on welfare long term (which includes Medicare for most people, especially conservatives) are either disabled or of advanced age. The disabled and many of the aged still work as they can, some out of boredom and others to supplement income.
The minority of people in the US that sit on welfare with no desire to work and no desire to better themselves is honestly not going to work in any situation. To point to them and say “this is why society could never work” is disingenuous at best. You’re doing conservatives’ work for them in stating we should dismantle all welfare programs since “the majority of people will not work if they don’t need to”. I don’t see how you can’t understand that you are saying the exact same things as the Republicans trying to get rid of all forms of welfare.
That doesn’t suggest it’s beneficial, although I’m not assuming we live in the best of all possible worlds. It’s inevitable, sort of like laws of physics or perhaps a mathematical theorem is a better analogy. Inequality is maybe like a natural disaster — or to some, it’s something much less disastrous, which you shouldn’t complain about so much. Anyway, you don’t just decide one day to stop having earthquakes, since they don’t seem like such a great idea anymore. Those are out of our control, so we may try to figure out ways of coping with them perhaps, but bothering to prevent them is more or less out of the question and may be difficult to even imagine. Our own system (although we seem to have created it), why we made it and what we’re doing with it … that isn’t even our own responsibility, not really. This stuff is out of our hands. Maybe that thought is consoling somehow.
The previous claim (extrapolating from PZ) was that it’s a good thing, purposefully designed by people to achieve a certain set of effects. We are being rewarded, in order to ensure that there will be workers or that work happens. It might be work of any sort, a satisfactory kind/amount of work, exceptional work, innovative work, or whatever. But it’s done because otherwise there will not be such work, since living/breathing people would not naturally have motivations, other than being paid differentially and (as you also allow) doing work “out of the goodness of their heart.” Of course, that’s just false and patently absurd — people would be motivated to work (and some definitely are interested in doing it well, since there is satisfaction in that) whether or not their pay is different from what anyone else is paid.
I’m not asking for much here … which story is it going to be? How will society collapse?
I think that if my needs are satisfied, I’m treated fairly, I’m doing something I like with my life (in my case, music), I don’t see anything problematic about that, much less something so destructive to civilization itself. I don’t need to compare my paycheck to another person’s paycheck, to feel like I’m doing better than they are, simply to have interests/motivations/desires/etc., because I already have those prior to any such comparison. I also care about other people, and it wouldn’t give me any happiness or make me conclude it must be fair, if the other person were paid less.
I don’t think we need anything like that, at least not to avoid such a collapse. Many people also have the superstition that we need God to have true meaning in our lives, but we don’t need that either. And all of this does have the same smell of superstition or paranoia about it. If you try not to be too invested in coming up with a lot of tendentious excuses and rationalizations for it, then I think you’d probably smell it too.
Of course, there isn’t just one very specific alternative to capitalism (which itself isn’t a single thing), so that can’t be expressing a coherent reason for being in favor of capitalism.
Since you’re making predictions, what would they choose to do? (You don’t get to repeat variations on “not work.”)
Do individuals exist to support societies, or is it the other way around? I think we make our society the way we think we want it to be, so that the individuals in it will benefit from what they’ve made. And I think you’re on very dangerous ground if you try to design individuals to fit into some pre-cooked (or half-cooked) society that’s never conceived of as being structured around and for them.
The implication is that work better not be voluntary; it better be forced. We must do something to guarantee there’s inequality (it’s not so inevitable after all), because people must work, because that wouldn’t happen any other way. I could just as well claim that kind of belligerent idiocy fosters a lot of resentment and instability. Indeed, for all I know, maybe the system you’re defending is collapsing in front of our eyes, for that very reason. But I don’t really put much stock into that.
Does it seem more justifiable to you to enforce labor, compared to enforced sharing/cooperation? How could I make sense of that? The latter at least sounds to me like it’s aimed at stability and aimed at recognizing our rights/needs as human beings. It doesn’t sound so much like we’re building a labor camp and trying our best to prevent anyone from escaping. I’m actually not worried at all about them escaping, that people might try to cheat the system, or any of these other things you’re paranoid about. I just want something that’s designed to be fair. If it isn’t perfect, it wouldn’t be the first time; but at least we’d have some idea of where we’re headed with it and how it’s failing to meet the criteria we set for ourselves, rather than no idea whatsoever.
As I already said, they will want to have food and a whole lot of other things. I don’t think you’re allowed the premise that economic inequality (or capitalism) somehow makes people less stupid. If they don’t want to work now, they may just starve because they can’t afford food, as some people actually do. But I think people like surviving (and a whole lot of other things) more than they like not-working. The things we need will require work either way, people will understand that either way, and that’s what would happen either way. There’s no evidence whatsoever that your pessimistic predictions or assessments of human behavior are correct, since nobody’s done that social experiment; and I think there’s plenty of everyday, common sense experience suggesting that they’re just plain silly assumptions to be making about people in the first place.
If what we would actually get out of the deal is not a loss of the entire social order, but that people buy less frivolous/useless/overpriced junk they can barely afford from some exploitative factory somewhere, they’re clearly focused on what’s really needed to have a decent life, recognize how much they need to help and respect each other, focus on protecting our environment (which certainly doesn’t benefit from the excesses of capitalism), and so forth … if those are the sorts of thing we would get, then I wouldn’t complain at all. Maybe that’s too optimistic, but what makes you think my predictions are any worse than yours?
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I don’t think this is actually true. For the vast, vast majority of the history of anatomically modern humans, we did nothing of the sort — we all lived as hunter-gatherers with minimal division of labour, communal sharing of resources, and very little trade. And there are still people who live this way.
I think what actually happens is that sedentary societies with advanced economies, once they do come about,* outbreed and outfight hunter-gatherers. So the dominance of these cultures is a selection effect, not a natural outcome of how humans like their societies to be organised.
*Since the life of a neolithic farmer is extremely unattractive compared to the life of a reasonably successful hunter-gatherer — worse diet, more illness, constant stultifying back-breaking labour, lower life expectancy, etc. — my preferred theory is that farming was a reaction to climate changes and population growth which made the hunter-gatherer lifestyle impossible. That’s also why some societies never made the switch — they never had to.
To consciousness razor
Goddamnit. You’re not reading again. Please try again. You somehow missed literally the sentence before the bit you quoted that covered expressly this. Let me copy-paste what I wrote, and please read it this time. I’ve added bolding for your benefit.
“It seems like you’re just ducking and ignoring the free-rider problem. Again, imagine a society whereby people are guaranteed free access to food, shelter, internet, and other amenities, with no strings attached. I agree that in order for this system to be sustained, someone needs to do the work. However, very few people will want to do the work.”
In this hypothetical system that I’m proposing, the desire to have food “and a whole lot of other things” is independent of working. People won’t work for food because that food is provided free of charge, with no requirement to do work, and with no other strings attached. Free. That is the sole purpose of this hypothetical, to imagine a system of government and economy where most things that you need and want are automatically provided for you, automatically, for free, with nothing required in exchange.
…
To consciousness razor, methuseus, and John Morales
Imagine we tried to set up a government program whereby everyone was granted a guaranteed personal income by the government to the tune of 100k USD, with the same buying power as today. I think that for most people, this will satisfy most or all of their material needs. Practically speaking, there will be little to no motivation to do work to earn money or seek other material rewards. At least, that sort of motivation will be drastically reduced compared to present day. In this hypothetical, people can still work if they want to, if the like the work, or out of a selfless desire to help others, or some other motivation.
In this system, lots of people still need to work to produce the goods that are distributed free of charge. Do you both really think that enough people would volunteer in this sort of system to do sufficient work of the requisite kinds in order to sustain the system, when they already receive more than enough food, shelter, and expendable income for free? I think no. I think that this should be rather obvious. I’m aghast that this is appearing to be contentious in any way.
I’m not sure that you, consciousness razor, actually understand what I’m saying (which is frustrating because I’ve written it out rather clearly). If you do understand me, and if I understand you correctly in return (which is far from clear), then I think that your view of the world is naive, childish, and silly. Same for methuseus and John. The sort of utopia depicted in Star Trek where most people work because they enjoy it, and that’s enough to sustain society, that is a fiction. It’s a fantasy. It might work if we had the same magic tech of the Star Trek universe, but it won’t work at our tech level. Maybe one day.
Frankly, if things were set so that I was guaranteed at least a livable income with no strings attached? Food and housing and medical care (and transportation?) taken care of? That’d get me on my own, free me up enough that I’d be able to take at least a part-time job, something that my meager and defective mental faculties would allow me to sustainably handle, and finally be able to save up for formal education so that I can seek out something that doesn’t require a panic attack every other day for money that still isn’t enough to allow my independence. Can you imagine? How cool would that be? I’d finally have something to be proud of.
As is, I’m jobless, skill-less, have no health insurance, and living with family members because the cost of living is currently so high that it’s beyond my reach even if I worked full time. I’ve long since lost sight of any hope of any sort of schooling, and the only hope I have of living on my own is to get extremely lucky.
A lot of people are stuck in poverty because they can’t afford resources that will allow them to escape it. While I’m sure there are folks who’d be happy to sit back and live in contentment on free money, it makes sense to me that more folks will use it to help improve their standard of living. When your essentials are taken care of and you aren’t worried about how you’re going to feed your family and keep them warm, it frees you up to invest.
Just a snippet from an article I found while poking around, but one I found interesting:
PS:
To be expressly clear, if my hypothetical had 10k USD yearly disposable income granted instead of 100k USD, then my conclusions would change. I don’t think that 10k USD at current buying power is enough so that most people wouldn’t work. However, there is a level at which lots of people would stop working. I picked 100k USD yearly because that seems pretty safely over the needs of most people to live a happy and fulfilled life.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
Indeed, we are well short of a post-scarcity society (the Culture is a far better example than Star Trek, BTW), but you certainly missed my point. There is no reference to any speculative utopia; rather, the claim is that there is already enough to go around right now, and the greatly extreme inequality of resource distribution could be changed to merely very extreme to the significant gain of the many at a barely-noticeable cost to the few.* Only the will and intent are lacking.
You have seen those visualisation videos of big numbers, have you not? Hard for our monkey brains to grok.
But consider that you would need to earn $1,000,000 every single year for 1,000 years without spending a penny of it to become a billionaire.
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* And don’t get me started on the so-called philanthropists who return a very tiny fraction of their wealth back to the community (let’s naively grant it’s out of the goodness of their hearts) and are seen as very munificent for the multi-millions they do contribute.
(Not to say that due kudos is not due for that; they do not need to do it)
EnlightenmentLiberal @36, if you include markers in your response it makes it easier to figure out where your response was to my thread.
As far as I can tell, I was unable to get my point across to you. Your response again focused on property rights, with the justification that that’s relevant when talking to libertarians. However, this site is not known for its love of libertarian beliefs, so it seems irrelevant to bring it up in the first place.
My points are that 1) your definition of property rights is not a valid. The threat “get off my land or I’ll call the cops” at the whim of the land owner, which you imply is a meaningful and direct consequence of property rights, is not universal. Yes, there are property rights in Sweden; and 2) I dislike your focus on land and money when your argument is really much broader. You should also be saying that the freedom of association, and the free practice of religion, and many other freedoms are as equally based on violence as property ownership.
That would lead to the (IMO trivial) argument that these rules, laws, or cultural expectations are set up to reduce violence, even if the potential for violence can never be eliminated. There’s no need to be a card-carrying radical Marxist to agree with that argument.
@Enlightenment Liberal #63:
So you’re stacking the deck against basically everyone you’re arguing against. Realistically people like me believe in a basic minimum income of $10k-20k per year. Enough to provide food and shelter if you’re very frugal, but not much else. How many people would stay home for a guaranteed $20k per year? Very few. I know I would work part time if not full time, in a field I would enjoy, in order to be able to have a few perks. Even at $100k I would definitely still work. Especially if society could only continue if I worked.
Stop trying to say we’re saying what we aren’t. The top 10%, possibly even the top 1%, could fund this scheme, worldwide (substitute $10k for whatever the same buying power in the local currency is) with very little effect on their overall wealth. I’m not saying they will or they even should. I’m just saying it’s possible.
As John Morales said, we have enough food to feed the world now if we could figure out the payments and logistics of it. If we went even more socialistic the difference for the average person would be even larger. Even just giving unions a bigger say in US companies would adjust the discrepancy a little.
We don’t need to institute any sort of requirement that food doesn’t just magically appear out of nowhere, without anybody doing any work to obtain it. Let me try to make a distinction as clear as I can:
1) You need something to eat, so I give you a carrot, because like everyone else, I am responsible for others. I ought to share what I can with people in need. If there’s anything I can do about it, I should make sure you don’t starve. There is a carrot available, so I can give it to you, then I do give it to you, at no cost to you, and you don’t starve. You might appreciate the carrot, because you’re an appreciative sort. But even if I’m certain you’ll be a complete fucking asshole about the whole thing, that would not be a good justification for letting you starve to death, so that’s not how I’m going to act. We could use many of the wonderful and powerful tools of our society to try to help you out with your antisocial/manipulative/assholish/etc. behavior, not punish you for it, but success in that regard is not a condition for just offering the carrot in the first place. It’s not a reward for anything, nor will you be deprived of it because we believe doing so would serve some higher purpose or teach you a lesson or whatever — it’s just a fucking carrot. There’s more where that came from.
2) A mysterious government facility conjures the fucking carrot out of nothing, violating physics as we know it, because in fact there weren’t sufficient people (people such as yourself) doing any actual work to produce it using ordinary methods. You get your carrot, again at no cost, and you learn a bad bad bad lesson that we can get by just fine in life this way, because magical carrot production methods exist to provide us with sustenance. This is not a carrot which is simply free for you, one which somebody else worked to produce — by hypothesis, it’s a physically impossible one that nobody made. But that doesn’t stop us. You do get it, and inexplicably this creates some kind of resentment among the population which makes and consumes ordinary carrots (which I would’ve assumed weren’t needed, but those old-fashioned people are still around I guess). Everything either falls apart because of these very negative feelings, which of course don’t exist in capitalistic societies, or maybe because the universe exploded due to being too fucking ridiculous to take itself seriously anymore. Either way, shit blows up fast, proving me wrong.
If it isn’t clear, the proposal I’m suggesting is like #1, not like #2. You’re apparently thinking that, because impossible carrots don’t exist, then system #1 is doomed to fail in humiliation and regret, fire and brimstone, gnashing of teeth, and so on. People will just starve themselves, either due to a mind-boggling and persistent level of stupidity and childishness, or because enough of them genuinely prefer living in a quasi-apocalyptic collapsed civilization, compared to getting their hands dirty with a bit of farming. I don’t know what else to take away from this, other than the conclusion that something is being severely blown out of proportion. Maybe a whole bunch of things.
EnlightenmentLiberal @18, @51, and elsewhere, why is it that rich people still work?
I mean, once someone has a few tens of millions of dollars it’s effectively equivalent to being “to just take stuff from the local government storehouse for free.” (Where “stuff” means “free food, housing, internet”, and not Gulfstream G500 bizjets.)
It’s almost as if there are societal incentives to work besides just having the basics of life.
I know a lot of people who develop free/open source software. The free market has done a piss-poor job of compensating them for their work. This can include software used by millions of people, where there is a clear societal benefit, but where the effect is so diffuse that the simple act of billing would be the largest overhead. So these projects are given away for free while the developers live off other means.
Several of these people would love a universal basic income, so they no longer need to work on the projects that pay, in order to work on the projects they think are more beneficial.
In your structuring, these are people who “would choose to no longer work. Would they “become a drain on society”? Because I don’t think so, but you don’t have a category for them.
#63:
I was just about to contest this (because man I can’t even comprehend living on 100k a year, and don’t know anyone who’s suggesting we set up a system like that) until I realized I’d initially misunderstood the context of your argument. My apologies.
That being said… Iunno, lots of people are willing to volunteer their services if they feel it’s their civic duty, up to and including being willing to sacrifice their life for it. I’m sure something suitably patriotic can be conjured up that will convince enough folks to produce for “the good of their country”.
I know I’d probably be making stuff. Or farming. I like working with my hands, and I like the idea of my efforts benefiting other people besides me, and even a fraction of 100k a year can buy a lot of equipment and materials. Not having to spend the majority of my time in a less fulfilling job trying to fund my survival helps a lot to open up time and resources to do other things. It is possible to find reward in a day’s work that doesn’t involve how much money you get out of it, especially when society finds ways to encourage people to associate a day’s work with something other than a paycheck.
People throw money at churches all day and night, but how many of those same peeps hate the idea of tax-funded social services because they feel entitled to every penny they make and the freeloading poor don’t deserve any of it? How many would do it if society didn’t encourage a “got mine, fuck everyone else” mentality when it comes to social services?
If nothing else, maybe folks get bored with their 100k-a-year lifestyle and want a little extra money to build a second add-on or something.
…My wordmaking is terrible. I guess what I’m getting at is maybe a way to encourage your hypothetical comfortable-for-life society to keep working is to use a little less “You are awesome because you have stuff,” and a little more “You are awesome because you help other people have stuff.”
“If,” [“the management consultant”] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .”
“Fiscal policy!” whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!”
The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
“Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.”
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.”
“If you would allow me to continue.. .”
Ford nodded dejectedly.
“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forw
As I understand it there’s a fair amount of evidence that the key element was the ability to produce significant quantities of alcohol.
@chrislawson #54
This is more of a numbers game than anything else: In each of 1943 and 1944 the Russians lost almost as many T-34s as the Germans would build of of the PzKpfw IV, V and VI _combined_ through the entire war and in 1945 were on track to lose even more.
PzKpfw IV production: 8500 units, (Ausf A through J, note that the ~1000 A through F₁ were infantry support, not anti-armour).
PzKpfw V production: 5000 units, (D, A and G).
PzKpfw VI production 1350 E, 500 B
You could also include the ~2000 PzKpfw III with the HV 5cm gun, (late model J through M), in place of the pre-F₂ IVs to get ~16,500 late war standard German tanks.
T-34 losses, 1943: 14,700
T-34 losses, 1944: 13,800
T-34 losses, 1945: 7,500 (through early May).
There is a reason the Russians only had 12,300 left of the 57,000 T-34s they had built by the end of the war.
The T-34/85 entered production in February 1943, about 6 months before the T-44 even entered the design stage and just shy of a year before the first T-44 prototype was built. The tiny numbers of T-44/85 produced before the end of the war were more due to delays in factory set-up than any desire to keep focus on the T-34. Post war, the production didn’t switch over because the reduced needs allowed designers to step back and resume work on the T-44/100, (which would evolve into the T-54).
Michael@6: “However in terms of billionaires I would like to see some evidence of exploitation or stealing.”
OK, let’s look at the Waltons. Employees of Walmart (or as I like to call them Waldemart) are one of the biggest groups accounting for Medicaid enrollment in all 24 states where stats exist. Waldemart isn’t just stealing from its employees. It’s stealing from taxpayers.
They like to say that they are a huge employer, but Waldemart doesn’t create jobs. They create work, because the wages they pay can’t buy a livelihood.
However, the problem with inequality is not just that it means a lot of poor people don’t get paid very much. It also distorts the economy. You can see this by looking at the inflation stats. There is very little inflation in food, etc. However, high-end real estate is doing quite well, and a not-very-good Leonardo just sold for nearly $150 million, nearly twice what the owner paid for it a few years ago.
you know I read this whole thread up to this point and as usual it makes me depressed or I should say it reminds me of how depressed i am already.
It is as always “cartoon” versions pitted against “cartoon” version with assumptions galore.
I thought one of the main reasons farming was so successful was it’s ability to produce a larger and more stable food supply than hunting and gathering.
The idea that a significant number of people would choose not to work if they were not forced to because they needed money to survive seems to be advocating the reality and rightness of wage slavery. There is no need in the prosperous countries for the overseer nor the chains and whips we have debt and rent that work much better and have the advantage of making the rich richer in the process.
If you change a major part of how society is organized why would you think that the rest of society would stay the same which seems to be an assumption. If you change the nature of work the nature of work would change seems likely.
like it or not it can not keep going on like it is going on now sooner or later something will change it.
uncle frogy
To John in 64
I think we’re in agreement. I agree that there should be substantial government wealth redistribution policies. I believe strongly that the system would not collapse due to leechers if we provided free food, housing, and education to everyone, and furthermore, I believe we should do exactly that, and probably more.
…
To Andrew
Property rights, by definition, is about granting special or privileged usage to some object to some person or persons. That special or privileged usage can only be sustained and enforced by threats of violence. This is true for land, goods, and even intellectual property.
I agree in spirit that an idealization of the current system is set up to reduce violence to a minimum. Pedantically, I have to disagree a little bit. I believe that the best version of the current system does use some additional violence compared to a hypothetical minimum in order to achieve other policy ends, specifically increased material wealth. We also use more violence than a hypothetical minimum to achieve more justice via the common policies of forcing jury duty and forcing witnesses to give testimony in court, but I suppose that one might successfully argue that this particular example is actually a net decrease in violence; I don’t know.
…
To methuseus
The top 1% alone could not sustain our civilization with their money. That’s ridiculous. Money by itself is useless paper. Money only has power because of a social agreement that money has power. Money has power in large part because it can buy labor. Money is useless in a scenario where 99% of the people don’t work, just like money is useless in a zombie apocalypse.
Maybe I’m misportraying what you actually meant to say. If so, sorry, but this is what I understood you to mean.
…
To consciousness razor
My assertion that is with our current tech level, not enough people would volunteer to work as part of a voluntary government program whereby anyone may receive from the government, for free, enough money to live a upper-middle-class lifestyle. You’re simply not even engaging with my position, and you’re attacking something else. I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but it’s nothing that I’m talking about. It’s bizarre. I don’t know how else to phrase my position.
…
To Andrew, methuseus, and consciousness razor, and maybe a few others
I just described my position in the paragraph above. I’m still surprised that this is at all controversial.
Of course some people would still do some work. Perhaps even a large majority would still do some work, for a suitably broad definition of “work”. However, not enough people would do enough work of the right kind of work in order to sustain society and sustain this government program of free money for a upper-middle-class lifestyle to anyone who wants it.
I must emphasize what I wrote above in this post: No amount of money can replace insufficient labor; money has power in large part because money can be traded for labor, and money has no value by itself; it’s just useless paper.
PS:
Someone wrote above something like I am praising wage slavery. No. I am not praising wage slavery. However, I am recognizing that some amount of wage slavery appears unavoidable due to the laws of physics and human psychology. For analogy, pain and suffering and death are unavoidable, and we must choose a system where there is some pain, suffering, and death, but that doesn’t mean we’re praising it. All choices suck, and we are obliged to choose to the least sucky choice.
And let me take a moment to emphasize what I said above: This childish need to stop all violence is IMO the underpinning of libertarianism. However, that sort of reasoning leads to tragic consequences. I’m seeing a very similar sort of childish reasoning here by people who are suggesting that society doesn’t need to use some sort of pressure to ensure that some people do some amount of work. I don’t even know what to say to something that obviously wrong.
I have firsthand knowledge that right-leaning individuals have no problem saying this about athletes especially, if not exclusively, black ones whether outspoken or not.
EL, #76:
This was to John, but let me say that we agree. It is confusing to see this, after everything else you’ve said in this thread and before some things to come, but whatever.
I don’t give a shit about anyone having an upper-middle-class lifestyle. I really don’t, never have, never will.
I think your reaction has been the bizarre part. I’m against economic inequality. Judging by the first quote above, so are you. You think we can manage to do something about it (more than just something), and as you considered how to address that problem, you apparently didn’t think it necessary to propose that addressing it means people must have enough money to live an upper-middle-class lifestyle. That shit was apparently not even on your radar, and you did just fine coming to a decent and clearly-expressed and sensible conclusion. So, we apparently think very similar things, although you find that bizarre and believe we’re not engaging with what you yourself have been talking about (except for this new quote above of course).
I also compared it to forced labor camps. The odd thing is that this all goes away when you remove the absurd requirement for an upper-middle-class lifestyle which nobody asked for, since in that case, you believe strongly that no such problems arise. Alright then, I’ll have what you’re having — the fairly reasonable thing that you don’t get to complain about anymore, which I think I was asking for the entire time.
Now we’re headed back to where we started. The pressure comes from our environment. This our only home, but the Earth isn’t a perfectly hospitable place. As organisms, particularly ones in a very social and intelligent species with a lot of power over what happens to ourselves and this planet, we have a whole lot of needs, deriving from what we are and the circumstances we are in. We obviously do need to work for things — there’s no dispute about that — thus, no additional pressure needs to be exerted by society to force people to work, since we wouldn’t work without such additional pressure. We’re stupid but not that stupid, and we don’t have such strong preferences against working that we’re willing to lose anything terribly consequential because of it. Our survival instincts, if nothing else, will keep us from being too lazy. Laziness is definitely not the big problem that we need to worry about here.
It’s as if you’re saying that people need to fall down due to gravity, so we had better burden everyone with lots of weights that they’re required to wear their whole lives (maybe create a few more bureaus to administrate it, etc.), just to be absolutely sure they do. That’s just silly. If anything, we should be happy if some happen to need a little less than others, not guarantee they’ll have to suffer more than they otherwise would, in order to solve what looks like a non-problem. Besides, we have no right to force anyone to do the kind of work society may try to demand of them. We’re not in a position to make such demands, I wouldn’t support any policy which tried to do it, and I don’t think any coherent political system could or should be about things like that.
To consciousness razor
Again, I’m discussing this in the context of a particular government program which grants, for free, food, housing, clothing, and other amenities, enough to reach a upper-middle-class lifestyle. In this artificial environment, there is no personal direct incentive from the environment to work for food, housing, clothing, nor many other things.
I’m discussing a particular hypothetical scenario with a particular hypothetical structure of society. I’ve always been discussing this particular scenario. I am not talking about whatever scenarios that you want to posit. Any other scenarios that you posit are irrelevant to talking about my scenario.
In my scenario, there is no such pressure from the environment. That’s the point of creating the scenario in the first place.
I emphatically disagree, for exactly the same reasons that I fundamentally and strongly disagree with the typical libertarian. You are sounding dangerously like a libertarian right now. This seems indistinguishable from the standard libertarian talking points, i.e. taxes are wrong, compelling people to perform jury duty is wrong, compelling witnesses to give testimony in court is wrong, etc.
chrislawson @54:
On that point you have my full agreement.
Yeah, the government can always decide they just need it more. lol Seriously though, the level to which this is the case has a lot to do with the local laws, and I would argue that in some states/districts, it is about as close as you could get to owning your own private planet, in that you could shoot, without cause, anyone so much as setting foot on the property (and, even people that should bloody know better that I know sometimes joke about this “right”).
On the more general subject, I am reminded about the EarthCent Ambassador series.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01E6O2ZIU?ref=series_rw_dp_labf
A species of AI called the Stryx pretty much control the economies of most of the universe, which humans have just recently been adopted into as a provisional member. of sorts, having managed to screw ourselves up so badly the Stryx decided it was just about time to intervene. Their main motto, which they drum into all species is, “Barter is Better”. Sure, you can still get rich, but your “rich” had better be marketable goods. Why? Because the only “valid” coinage in the universe, for buying anything really big without, when/if you need to, is made “intentionally volatile”. Basically, the longer you keep the cash, the less of it you have. It literally just evaporates, if you don’t pass it on to someone in a transaction. So.. don’t keep those credits. Forget being a millionaire, never mind a billionaire, because you might be one this week, but at the rate the value of that credit chip is slipping, you will be a pauper by next month.
Make for in interesting idea. lol
EnlightenmentLiberal @76, I don’t think you understand my objections. You keep bringing up objects, or intangible things like copyright treated as objects. My objection is that non-objects, like the right to associate, are equally backed by the threat of force. So far you have not touched on that but only repeated the same thing about property rights.
My other objection is that “special or privileged usage” is so vague as to be meaningless. When I reserve a shelter at a national forest, I have “special or privileged usage” of the shelter, but it’s certainly not a property right. When I lay out a blanket to watch the fireworks at the National Mall, I have special use of that bit of land, and the police may help enforce it, but it’s again not a property right.
The only definite example of a consequence of property rights that you mentioned, “the threat “get off my land or I’ll call the cops”” doesn’t even apply to Sweden. Instead, you are talking in such generalities, and changing your hypotheticals, that I can’t figure out exactly what it is you are trying to say.
As an example of a hypothetical, you wrote: “I agree in spirit that an idealization of the current system is set up to reduce violence to a minimum. Pedantically, I have to disagree a little bit.” All I wrote was “to reduce violence”. I have no idea if any modification of the current system can achieve that goal of reaching a minimum, and it feels like you are presenting a strawman argument solely so you can voice a disagreement.
As an example of changing your hypotheticals, you earlier wrote that this government warehouse would provide “free food, housing, internet, with absolutely no strings attached.” Now you are talking about “enough money to live a upper-middle-class lifestyle”. Those are two quite different things, and as consciousness razor points out, that lifestyle isn’t even a universal goal.
The reason why I am “not even engaging with [your] position, and […] attacking something else” is because you keep changing your position, and I, at least, am criticizing one of those other positions.
You wrote “This childish need to stop all violence is IMO the underpinning of libertarianism.” Okay, great. But as I pointed out there’s no love of libertarianism on this blog, and I don’t think anyone here is making it, so why are you repeating this when no one cares and it doesn’t make a difference?
You wrote that there is a “childish reasoning here by people who are suggesting that society doesn’t need to use some sort of pressure to ensure that some people do some amount of work. I don’t even know what to say to something that obviously wrong.”
However, you have still not answered my question. Why do rich people work?
Obviously they do, even though they can afford an upper middle-class lifestyle by living off of their interest. As I wrote, “It’s almost as if there are societal incentives to work besides just having the basics of life.”
Why aren’t those other societal incentives sufficient for the non-rich to also continue to work, and keep society going?
Is the missing piece here that you are assuming this is the only alternative to “economic inequality?”
To Andrew Dalke
I agree that force is used to enforce many aspects of society, and most other legal rights. Property rights are not special in this regard.
If someone walks up to you and takes your wallet and runs, then people will use force to restrain this person, and put them in a cage, and retrieve the wallet, and return it to you. If someone steals your car, bike, etc., then people will use force to restrain this person, and put them in a cage, and retrieve the wallet, and return it to you. If you published a novel, and someone produces a copy of that novel without your permission, then people will use force to prevent distribution of that copy and people will also use force to dissuade this person from violating copyright law again. Property rights is all about guaranteeing monopoly use rights (absolute or limited) regarding the use of some object. That’s basically definitional. I don’t understand how we’re still hung up on this.
Totally agree. My analysis drastically changes between the two scenarios. The first we definitely should do via government handout, and the second is IMO impossible to do via a simple government handout.
This was to consciousness razor. At least, that’s what I meant. Sorry, I think you’ve been engaging just fine. Sorry for not making my position clear from the front. Sorry for giving the appearance that I’m changing my position.
I disagree. I think many people here are espousing the fundamental mistakes of libertarianism. For example, just upthread, consciousness razor said that it’s always wrong to force someone to perform labor for the benefit of (others in) society. That is the fundamental foundational flaw of libertarianism, and consciousness razor just repeated it. IMO, it is that false moral assumption which leads almost necessarily to libertarianism.
Not everyone has the same motivations. Some people are motivated to work to be richer than their neighbor. Some are motivated to work for power. There’s a lot of variation in human needs and motivations.
That’s just the way that many / most humans are. I could pretend to give an evolutionary-psychology explanation, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re looking for, and I would be just guessing if I tried.
I assume you meant to ask that as a rhetorical question to get me to question my beliefs regarding my “free upper-middle-class handout” scenario. Sorry, your plan didn’t work.
Most significant question here hitherto, for mine, by cr @59:
A fundamental demarcation.
—
Best as I can tell, things are not quite as bad in Oz as in the USA, but they are bad enough.
I think it says a fair bit when a society considers its health system or prison system (or mass transport system, etc) to be run most efficiently as a for-profit private enterprise (as opposed to a not-for-profit public enterprise) but doesn’t apply that same justification to its police system*.
—
* I am aware of asset forfeiture laws etc, but that’s a different thing.
??
I’m discussing a very particular scenario. I’m not sure what arguments you’re trying to imply to me.
I believe that economic inequality is unavoidable entirely, except for particularly obscure social setups such as where all property is gathered up and redistributed evenly on a periodic basis, but I believe no one considers this to be a “real option”, and therefore I’ll also ignore it, and therefore I’ll again assert that economic inequality is unavoidable in real society.
I’m pursuing the simple assertion that we cannot have government handout programs that grant a high-quality standard of living, e.g. a upper-middle-class standard of living, because such a system would implode due to lack of volunteers to perform the necessary work to maintain the system. For example, if it was supported by taxes, then there wouldn’t be enough tax income to support the system.
I still believe that we ought to supply basics for free via government handout programs, including food, basic housing, good education, and basic internet. With those handouts alone would, many people would still feel the personal need to work, and society would go on just fine.
My answers change depending on the available technology in society. My answers are for the current technology level.
I think the real problem is that societies always seem to get it bloody backwards, and then they exacerbate this to the point where pretty soon people won’t do the work, without the incentive. Basically, the dirty jobs “need” some sort of added incentive, because almost no one would ever do them unless either a) they had no damn choice, because nothing is free, so they need money, so they have to do them, or b) doing them well pays more than doing most other things badly.
What we have is a system that have picked the former, then made the, “pays really damn well”, jobs those that you can do a half assed, but good enough, at, to not be jailed for it, and make buckets of money for. Doctors for example. At one time most people that went into this, though not all, did it because they honestly wanted to help people. Now.. you get bloody places like the local hospital here where 1 day of the week the most important/specialized doctor is at the hospital, another 2 days a week they are at some other hospital, and the rest of the time they are wandering around there nearest golf course. If you get injured on a day they are not there, or, merely if you are not out of your bloody mind, you have them airlift you to some place that isn’t 100% for profit, where you might actually “see” the damn doctor.
So, why did these people become doctors? It sure as hell wasn’t because they where merely adequately paid, but really wanted to help people.
Non-money incentives are, I think, tricky. Its kind of like games on cell phones. Its “free”, but you have to work your butt off, day to day, during the time they allow you, before it sleeps for X hours, until it gives you more time to play, or you have to pay for the privilege to do “more” than that.
So, maybe basic internet is free, but streaming hi def, or playing games with a lot of bandwidth, etc. isn’t. Free housing – sure, if all you need is basic housing. Free food – again, sure, but if you want something else, you have to go some place else. And so on. Even the most lazy person will have “something” they are not willing to go without, and need to do something to get the money to pay for. The “cheats” will, ironically, be the ones working 5 times as hard as everyone else to hack the system, bypass the limits, etc., on the internet, which would probably be just about the only thing they “could” rig in their favor (unless you do something stupid, like having the same people supplying the basic food also supply the “extras”).
Point being, the vast majority of people are going to want “something” more than this minimum, even if they have sponge off a neighbor as the only way to get it without working. Other than the spongers and would be hackers though, everyone else is going to find work, to pay for the extras.
Then, we just have the problem, again, of whether to pay the guy picking up the trash, or doing some other similar job, less than some ass doing next to nothing, but thinks they deserve the “prestige” salary, because they have the “prestige” job.
What I do know is that it would almost certainly work fine, right up until all the do gooders, trying to stop the cheats, or gift more than necessary, or otherwise monkey with the system, screwed it all up again, and the, “See, see! It doesn’t work!”, crowd show up to tear it all apart again (having probably helped the others screw it up).
Then I don’t care what you’re discussing, and I don’t see why anyone should. This is at best a distraction from discussing how we need to address all of the real-world problems of inequality in a serious and very much non-hypothetical way, and I don’t appreciate that at all.
There is no program, policy, technology, or anything else that will make it such that people don’t need food and so forth to survive, that they won’t have a strong drive to continue surviving and do what’s required to satisfy that. That’s always going to be case, so long as we’re talking about the human beings we all know and love in this universe.
If you want to imagine groups of non-humans, which don’t in fact need anything, and for some strange reason you still want to impose needs upon them artificially as if that were a desirable goal in itself, then I don’t really care about that either. (But it sounds like they’d be better off if you weren’t meddling with them — you’d be creating these problems for them that they didn’t previously have, just so you’ll be able to save the day.) It’s being postulated that they are somehow getting what they now need, technologically or magically or however you like, therefore, it’s not going to follow that they don’t get what they need, so that isn’t going to be a problem that you might identify. You’re also free to postulate that this is (or must be) accomplished via forced labor, but you aren’t deriving it from anything else. That’s just an assertion which has been pulled out of nowhere, one you arbitrarily made in the process of setting up this pointless “scenario,” not a conclusion reached by logically evaluating any evidence or concepts or explanations or theories (or whatever else) that we have any reason to believe are true.
So whatever, talk about creating a political system / labor camp for upper-middle-class fucking rocks, if you really feel the urge to do so…. I’d prefer it if you did that in another time and place; just don’t fucking pretend like it has anything to do with economic inequality among human beings.
If there isn’t a bridging postulate similar to the one I referenced then why are you discussing this when no one else is?
To consciousness razor
You asked what PZ likely meant. I explained at such. You didn’t understand. I tried to explain some more. At some point, apparently you lost the context of the discussion. I don’t appreciate you being so difficult about it, and being an asshole about it.
EL:
I passed over this earlier, but a misunderstanding this bad is probably worth addressing, even if you’re not too keen on reading me carefully:
That isn’t what I said. We don’t get to tell you, for instance, that you need to work at McDonald’s (instead of doing whatever you want with your own life, if it isn’t hurting anyone else) because we as a society demand more of their cheap hamburgers. We should not plan our society around my goal of wanting McDonald’s cheap hamburgers delivered to me by a slave (a goal I don’t actually have). If people don’t want to do that kind of work, nobody should be able to force them to do so anyway. I can definitely imagine some people may want to do it, and in fact I value certain things like a relatively low-risk, undemanding work environment (which I can leave at work and not take home) that this kind of work could offer to people. I’m not great with people, but at some level personal interactions and meeting interesting new people are valuable too, so that is also something I could imagine getting out of the job. But if McDonald’s, hamburger production, the fast food industry, or whatever else, happens to go under because we didn’t push people into it based on our own preconceptions about how things need to be, to get what we want out of society at the expense of others and their own autonomy, then it is perfectly fine that shit like this doesn’t work out in the end. There are no people or classes of people, who get to make such decisions in a free/democratic society.
Anyway, as I’ve said, I do demand that people must share with each other. This can be done through taxes, or through various other systems if those would be better, but it would make no sense whatsoever to say it shouldn’t be used to benefit others. “From each according to her ability, to each according to her need” is a good enough formulation to make the point, and the reasons for both halves of it are important to understand.
You’ve been claiming people will just stop working (or not work so much or so well), if they aren’t so desperate as lower-class people in our own society in fact are (workers at McDonald’s, for instance), since their basic needs would and should be taken care of (I claim), no matter what kind of work they may or may not do, on the simple moral/political premise that they are people who need our help.
I think that is false: people will keep working, for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. And I’ve been saying their needs should be provided for by society, which will of course happen because (contrary to your ludicrous predictions) there will still be labor that people are performing which will benefit their society.
To consciousness razor
So we disagree factually about the outcome of my hypothetical concerning free access to upper-middle-class standard of living. As respectfully as I can, because you’ve been mostly civil and reasonable, I still think that your position here is ridiculous, childish, and naive.
I accept your difference between forced specific labor, and forced general labor ala taxes. I largely accept your point. However, I will remind you of what I wrote previously, which you seemingly ignored: forcing jury duty, forcing witnesses to give testimony in court. These are exceptions to your rule. As another example, the military draft. Sometimes in our actual society, we do force people to perform specific tasks for the betterment of others, and with very severe penalties for refusal to perform these tasks. Also, I think that some of these particular examples are justified, and I still must object to your particular absolute rule “no one should be compelled to perform a specific labor”.
Dude take a look in the mirror you might find an A hole looking back you
@88 said that much better than I ever could
From Mano Singham’s blog:
“It’s good to be the king or, failing that, rich” : https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2017/11/30/its-good-to-be-the-king-or-failing-that-rich/#more-44617
So if you are wealthy enough, and politically powerful enough you can rescind the auction and completely ignore the rules.
Enlightenment Liberal: That’s just the way that many / most humans are. I could pretend to give an evolutionary-psychology explanation, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re looking for, and I would be just guessing if I tried.
I would like to see some evidence for this claim.
To octopod
Not sure how reliable this particular source is. Found it via a google search.
> 1 On the (lack of) stability of communes: an economic perspective / Ran Abramitzky*
https://people.stanford.edu/ranabr/sites/default/files/abramitzky_handbook.pdf
But it does confirm my initial suspicion that looking at historical small-size communes could provide valuable hard evidence concerning this debate. (I’m still surprised that my position is controversial.) I might do some more research on the topic and post good sources here. Might.
Yeah, but there is definitely something wrong with the *real* model, which could be described as, “A job 99% of the people that do it eventually quit, because they can’t stand doing it, but, never the less, stays in business because its also the only job 99% of the people can find.” There is more than one way to “push” someone into doing something. If you need money, you will willingly put up with all sorts of things, and not every underpaid sweat shop worker, in some third world country, is there because armed gunmen won’t let them leave – some of them are there because its the only job they can get, no matter how poorly they are paid for it. The US economy, in some parts, is only not as bad as this *purely* because the worst state of existence for the poor is a higher standard of living, in nearly all cases, than the best state in those third world countries (and, even that can end, quite fast, if, say, the GOP passed a tax scam that gutted billions of out social programs, which help keep that “worst state” higher than it is in other places).