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Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘producti
by avalys 2mo ago
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
- beanjuiceII 2mo ago[flagged]
- Telaneo 2mo agoI've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?
- a-french-anon 2mo agoOf course nobody sane wants something like this to happen. The problem isn't the people unable to make ends meets, it's the unwilling.
- inigyou 2mo agoHow can you even tell the difference? Most people can't. They just assign everyone to the bucket of unwilling.
- a-french-anon 2mo ago(Reasonable) Good faith at the individual level is a good thing, but when trying to scale it and build a working socialist system out of it, you're 100% set for failure.
- Telaneo 2mo agoMost people want to work. Most people want to provide value in some form. The author of the article is unable and willing, but is still treated as unwilling by the system. We're better of acting in good faith and treating everybody who says they are unable as that, and give them the support they need.
- CursedSilicon 2mo agoThis smells a lot of "I'm miserable so everyone else must be as unhappy as I am" What if we make a better world for everyone, instead of a planetary crab bucket?
- CalRobert 2mo agoSometimes they are forbidden from making the things they’d like for themselves. You used to be able to get your own food, build your own home, etc. But enclosure put a stop to that. And besides, who made the land you live on?
- Telaneo 2mo agoWe have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
- pj_mukh 2mo ago“We have enough excess in society” How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
- XorNot 2mo agoThe world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
- anovikov 2mo ago...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
- pharrington 2mo agoIn the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
- pj_mukh 2mo agoJust a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number). Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
- 2mo ago
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- germinalphrase 2mo agoIncreasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.
- ajsnigrutin 2mo agoThis has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers. This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have". Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
- germinalphrase 2mo agoLet’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
- neom 2mo ago[dead]
- pjmlp 2mo agoMany places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big. But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoPeople who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
- freehorse 2mo agoIs the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even. At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
- jplrssn 2mo ago> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
- avalys 2mo agoIf they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive. If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange. When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
- jplrssn 2mo agoMy point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society. I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
- birksherty 2mo agoMeh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
- qwytw 2mo agoCost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference. While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
- ahoka 2mo agoWhat a tone deaf comment.
- astral_drama 2mo ago> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
- avalys 2mo agoA privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
- astral_drama 2mo ago> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? You do > I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once. > That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books. Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoAnd yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between. People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
- Suzuran 2mo agoDoes it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
- chneu 2mo agoTechnically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
- Suzuran 2mo agoIt's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
- efficax 2mo agoSocial security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
- ImJamal 2mo agoI think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS > A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors Just replace investors with tax payers.
- RobinL 2mo agoBy that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
- alexgieg 2mo agoBillionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy. Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
- kbelder 2mo agoA billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.
- alexgieg 2mo agoDepends on what's being compared. Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
- bjertoref 2mo agoStephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- byutifu 2mo agoI hate being a contrarian for my first comment, but not everyone is lucky enough or afforded parents and opportunity like Hawking.
- gymbeaux 2mo agoHe was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
- GeoAtreides 2mo agoAt least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
- birksherty 2mo ago3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.
- onraglanroad 2mo agoI know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.
- trial3 2mo agoWho produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
- WarmWash 2mo agoThe people getting paid by the other time I spend productively.
- didibus 2mo agoThe $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go. If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
- AngryData 2mo agoThere is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoYou could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you. The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
- george916a 2mo ago[dead]
- xhkkffbf 2mo agoExactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others. Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.