Oh I see the problem you’re having, you still think most jobs need doing.
They don’t.
The majority of jobs under a capitalist society are not needed to produce goods, nor distribute goods, nor consume goods.
We could just eliminate health insurance. Entirely. Just completely remove the concept from our society. There are now 1.6 million people that need work. Median age of 32.
Remove all insurance and we get up to 3 million. That’s about 5% of the working population.
Insurance is only needed under capitalism. so let’s eliminate that.
Now eliminate Marketers. Now all advertising. and so on. Eliminate middle management.
Congrats. we keep going like this and we can easily get a quarter or more of the working population doing something useful.
Now let’s bring in incentives for the chronically unemployed, the majority of which just can’t compete in capitalism, but still have both the skills and capability to flourish under alternative economic systems that don’t require 40-80 hour work weeks after begging for a job through the least efficient hiring process ever developed.
The more you dig into the facts, the more you realize that not only do we not need most people working full time, we don’t need most people working.
And with more free time that increases innovation, and without a capitalist structure preventing automation vis-a-vi complete societal collapse, congrats you now have incentives to reduce work even further to the minimum amount.
This not only allows for depopulation, but actively encourages it, naturally, as despite having more free time and resources and less stress, people would only have kids if they wanted kids. Not because they need someone to take care of them in their old age, or other such coercive, frankly evil excuses to have kids.
I don’t think most jobs need doing. I don’t want any jobs at all period.
But if you have four old people who need four workers to care for them and there’s only one worker to go around no amount of firing social media managers and insurance adjusters is gonna fix it.
This isn’t an economic problem, it’s a demographic one. Which is why it’s a problem across the world and not just in capitalist nations. (And is in fact worst in China due to the effects of the one child policy.)
You don’t need one worker per old person. The best care homes in the world still do 10-1. Most care homes get by with minimal incidents at 20-1. Heck you won’t even get investigated for neglect in the US until you’re at 30-1 or higher (depending on the state.)
As someone who was a CNA for a short while – either the old people are doing fine, in which case they mostly take care of themselves with ‘reminders’ and ‘structure’ provided by the carers, or they’re REALLY not doing fine in which case they’re going to the hospital and statistically will not need constant care for much more than a few hours.
Old people are shockingly self sufficient, almost like they’re people, even in terrible condition; one good nurse and a CNA can handle a 20-odd crowd from breakfast (including wiping) to settling in for bed (including wiping, so much wiping). Technically a nurse can do it alone if they have no overweight or PITA patients to oversee.
Okay, let’s assume it’s 10-1. How many other people, in a perfectly efficient system, would it take to provide a decent quality of life for that caretaker and the 10 elderly people? Growing and transporting food, building and maintaining infrastructure, researching and providing medical care, producing electricity and clean water. Nothing extra.
Way, way less than you think. 2+2++1+3%. That is the entirety of food workers and food transportation, packaging, and sales, respectively, as a percentage of population for the united states, which produces twice the food needed by the population.
Water workers? maybe 5%. and that’s a hard maybe because that includes all plumbers, not just infrastructure. Electricity? As long as we don’t go with coal and oil it’s an average of 1 worker per GW. admittedly line workers and electricians make up a decent chunk approaching 3 whole % of a population, but let’s be honest here, we’re fine on that front still.
And that’s the great thing about economies of scale and automation and mechanization. It’s not the 1700s anymore. We don’t have to have 98% of the population in food production. We don’t have to waste productivity. We are, and this isn’t a joke, on average more than 10,000 times more productive as individuals and as a species than our ancestors.
That’s nice kiddo. Statistics do not lie. Period. The sole reason you and everyone you have ever or will ever know is not a farmer, is exclusively because of mechanization and automation. The reason you have clothes that do not cost a month’s pay check is exclusively because of mechanization and automation. The reason you have the technology to type this sentiment on is because of mechanization and automation.
That’s nice, and genuinely good for you if that’s your calling, but that is something you choose, not something that you need to do. Again the total number of people on the planet contributing practically 100% of the food grown for sale is 2%. Down from 98% less than two centuries ago.
The reason people are able to do things other than farm for 6-9 months out of the year, is because productivity in that field is so incredibly high we can feed the world off the labor of 2 people in a hundred. And this is already, currently, true for nearly all production fields. A single textile worker produces more textiles than a 1,000 could have a century ago. Similar increases in productivity are true for nearly every field save for incredibly niche (but still important) industries.
Automation is just going to keep increasing this over time. We will never completely eliminate human labor, at least not while we resemble anything close to human, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have already dropped the 40 hour work week down to 10 hours (we’d still have more production than at any point in human history) and that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to eliminate work to the furthest extent possible so we can actually enjoy life; even if that enjoyment for people like you is spending your time farming manually.
‘funding’ is a capitalist term, but yes a simplification of socialist and post-currency economics would be ‘the government funds treating the sick’… like it does in 109 countries, including every developed nation, and a majority of recognized developing nations except the US.
What term would you use instead of “funding”? Even if we ditch capitalism, as we should, doctors et al still need to get paid, and hospitals still need money to operate (assuming we got rid of any for-profit healthcare). We wouldn’t be doing this with a barter system, right?
The problem is that the base still relies on humans. Even in a perfect system you can’t eliminate greed. Eventually someone will want more than what they need and use violence to take it and the cycle repeats
I’m not sure if why you’re aggressively pushing the idea that I’m against the idea of eliminating capitalism or changing to a different form of government for disagreeing to a specific point. I’m trying to have a discussion and perhaps have my viewpoints challenged and yet often on this platform everyone devolves to hostile dunkage.
Aaaanyways. I just find the idea of no currency to be difficult to implement. You need everyone to feel like their work is equally as valuable as others, and also for people not to feel as though others are receiving things despite doing nothing for them. Yes working to have anything is absolutely capitalism but also if someone spends their entire life toiling away doing say plumbing and someone else decides to do nothing and still receives stuff that seems a bit asinine. I’m all for supporting those who literally can’t participate in the labor or you know having actual maternal leave etc etc, but I can’t really fathom obliterating my body while someone else doesn’t and receiving equal allocations. And at the point then we’ll food and water and whatever else you get is still a currency. Perhaps there’s a different angle to this though that I’m some how not understanding
You’re right that I’m relatively hostile and in general this platform breeds hostility due to the ideological differences between those that created and originally populated the platform, and reddit ‘refugees’ that disagree with reddit’s management but not the far-right ideologies so ever present in all aspects of that website (fostered of course by bots). Those with your viewpoint tend not to want to learn, and instead decide anyone to the left of burning orphans for warmth is a ‘tankie.’ That’s not fair to you.
To clarify, you have a transactional worldview, you assume that in order to exist, one must be useful to society. This incidentally narrows down the number of countries you could be from, as it’s not actually a common idea. Protestants, and generally former global empires are the two places you’ll see this so readily codified into the public conscious to be fed down to a general idea of jealousy of your fellow worker; i.e. you believe that all things must be earned, and if you feel someone is getting something that by your estimation they have not earned, you feel slighted.
This is a greedy and self-interested idea, but can be worked with until you limit the essentials. So I’d like to refocus on that.
In a normal human household, for nearly all of human history and human present, in nearly all cultures and societies that have ever existed, the family dynamic is the one least commonly likely to be transactional. You wouldn’t keep food away from your child if they failed to do a chore, you wouldn’t take medicine away from your grandparents because they are too sick to sweep up, you wouldn’t stop showing affection towards your lover just because the dishes weren’t done. This is a non-transactional relationship. Everyone gets what they need, unconditionally. Now luxuries, that might be withheld; that might entirely be absent; that might be a reward for hard work – but the essentials everyone gets, even if they come at great personal loss.
Now, one might say, that is just family, and that could not work beyond that unit – again we look at history and the present. In most societies, in most cultures, in most of human history the ‘family’ and the ‘village’ had little differences beyond who is a possible (and societally acceptable) mate. Human behavioral biology (free course btw) is an interesting field that shows us that we didn’t evolve to protect the clan, those related to us; we evolved to protect everyone we saw as a tribe – including those not genetically related to us. How and why would evolution do that? What possible ‘survival of the fittest’ category could that fulfill? In short (but seriously watch the course) when we take care of others, and others take care of us, we all prosper and are more likely to pass on our genes. When we compete we are less likely to pass on our genes. Because competition narrows both the genetic field and makes it harder for those that survive the competition to continue surviving. We are not polar bears who can go off independently for half our adult lives and come back only to mate; we are weak tribal apes that have evolved to rely on each other.
Now… that background out of the way;
Imagine a world where we extend that family unit. We extend that tribe. We have an essential set of things that all humans are entitled to, that we all work to fulfill. Luxuries, again, may be withheld or rewarded, but not food, water, shelter, or any of the necessary items we all have come to rely on.
But, you will likely say, what if someone is greedy? – Greed is primarily a learned trait, although there is a clear genetic component, most people are not greedy. Those that are, we could treat like we treat any other person that breaks the social contract; i.e. education, imprisonment, or similar corrective action.
But, you might ask, how do we know who is actually contributing? – And I ask, why does that actually matter? To alay this concern I would point to the mountain of evidence that people want to work, especially when they are not alienated from the effects of their work; but I would still ask why does it matter? Does your toddler need to work in order to eat? Does your grandmother? Again we should be extending the idea of the tribe beyond our immediate web of connections, and that requires trust. And through research we can see the trust will always statistically be well placed.
But, you might ask, how do people get rewarded for their work? What’s the incentive? – The incentive, primarily, is the same incentive a mother has to clean up a spill or a child has to help their sibling with homework. Not love or anything so immeasurable – but good will, the direct understanding of the good that work does, and the satisfaction of knowing you made a positive change in your environment. Now that’s not to say there can’t be other rewards. Not every job has someone that wants to do it (though we’ve all seen enough kink videos to know most every job has someone way too into doing it that they’d do it for free), and maybe there can be additional incentive structures for luxuries; but the goal would be through education and showing people the direct positive results of their actions that everyone helps how they can, when they can, as much as they can.
But, you might ask, about those that are genetically greedy, those that would ‘take advantage’ and try to hoard wealth? Well my friend, there are a myriad of solutions for that, again from education and imprisonment, to the good ol’ French Micro Press.. Setting up a trust-based, family-oriented (actually family oriented) society means there are still rules, and those that would tear down society for their own gain would be on the level of murderers and child molesters.
Not directly linked but the ideas referenced throughout:
Yes, we cannot eliminate currency at this stage of the game. But we can have democratic socialism, and universal basic income, and Medicare for all, and still have money, including more money for people who choose to work for it.
What’s it like to consider reality a distant and off-putting concept but an imaginary conception of society totally familiar and so doable it’s not even worth mentioning the process to get to it?
It’s better than pretending that repeating history and failed ideas will magically generate a different outcome. Pretending that we can ‘fix’ capitalism with more regulations or more reforms is silly when there has never been a successful capitalist country in history.
They, at best, have to adopt socialist-adjacent policies paid for by the explicit rape of slave countries and colonies just to survive a few more decades; with no actual plans for what happens if those colonies throw off their chains or how to ever stop exploiting people to survive.
Oh I see the problem you’re having, you still think most jobs need doing.
They don’t.
The majority of jobs under a capitalist society are not needed to produce goods, nor distribute goods, nor consume goods.
We could just eliminate health insurance. Entirely. Just completely remove the concept from our society. There are now 1.6 million people that need work. Median age of 32.
Remove all insurance and we get up to 3 million. That’s about 5% of the working population.
Insurance is only needed under capitalism. so let’s eliminate that.
Now eliminate Marketers. Now all advertising. and so on. Eliminate middle management.
Congrats. we keep going like this and we can easily get a quarter or more of the working population doing something useful.
Now let’s bring in incentives for the chronically unemployed, the majority of which just can’t compete in capitalism, but still have both the skills and capability to flourish under alternative economic systems that don’t require 40-80 hour work weeks after begging for a job through the least efficient hiring process ever developed.
The more you dig into the facts, the more you realize that not only do we not need most people working full time, we don’t need most people working.
And with more free time that increases innovation, and without a capitalist structure preventing automation vis-a-vi complete societal collapse, congrats you now have incentives to reduce work even further to the minimum amount.
This not only allows for depopulation, but actively encourages it, naturally, as despite having more free time and resources and less stress, people would only have kids if they wanted kids. Not because they need someone to take care of them in their old age, or other such coercive, frankly evil excuses to have kids.
I don’t think most jobs need doing. I don’t want any jobs at all period.
But if you have four old people who need four workers to care for them and there’s only one worker to go around no amount of firing social media managers and insurance adjusters is gonna fix it.
This isn’t an economic problem, it’s a demographic one. Which is why it’s a problem across the world and not just in capitalist nations. (And is in fact worst in China due to the effects of the one child policy.)
You don’t need one worker per old person. The best care homes in the world still do 10-1. Most care homes get by with minimal incidents at 20-1. Heck you won’t even get investigated for neglect in the US until you’re at 30-1 or higher (depending on the state.)
As someone who was a CNA for a short while – either the old people are doing fine, in which case they mostly take care of themselves with ‘reminders’ and ‘structure’ provided by the carers, or they’re REALLY not doing fine in which case they’re going to the hospital and statistically will not need constant care for much more than a few hours.
Old people are shockingly self sufficient, almost like they’re people, even in terrible condition; one good nurse and a CNA can handle a 20-odd crowd from breakfast (including wiping) to settling in for bed (including wiping, so much wiping). Technically a nurse can do it alone if they have no overweight or PITA patients to oversee.
Okay, let’s assume it’s 10-1. How many other people, in a perfectly efficient system, would it take to provide a decent quality of life for that caretaker and the 10 elderly people? Growing and transporting food, building and maintaining infrastructure, researching and providing medical care, producing electricity and clean water. Nothing extra.
And how many people to support these people.
Probably more than we’d have available to work.
There’s a reason China started taxing condoms.
Way, way less than you think. 2+2++1+3%. That is the entirety of food workers and food transportation, packaging, and sales, respectively, as a percentage of population for the united states, which produces twice the food needed by the population.
Water workers? maybe 5%. and that’s a hard maybe because that includes all plumbers, not just infrastructure. Electricity? As long as we don’t go with coal and oil it’s an average of 1 worker per GW. admittedly line workers and electricians make up a decent chunk approaching 3 whole % of a population, but let’s be honest here, we’re fine on that front still.
And that’s the great thing about economies of scale and automation and mechanization. It’s not the 1700s anymore. We don’t have to have 98% of the population in food production. We don’t have to waste productivity. We are, and this isn’t a joke, on average more than 10,000 times more productive as individuals and as a species than our ancestors.
Having worked in technology for a quarter century I do not have the rosy view of it that you do.
That’s nice kiddo. Statistics do not lie. Period. The sole reason you and everyone you have ever or will ever know is not a farmer, is exclusively because of mechanization and automation. The reason you have clothes that do not cost a month’s pay check is exclusively because of mechanization and automation. The reason you have the technology to type this sentiment on is because of mechanization and automation.
Counterpont: I have been and endeavor to be again a farmer
That’s nice, and genuinely good for you if that’s your calling, but that is something you choose, not something that you need to do. Again the total number of people on the planet contributing practically 100% of the food grown for sale is 2%. Down from 98% less than two centuries ago.
The reason people are able to do things other than farm for 6-9 months out of the year, is because productivity in that field is so incredibly high we can feed the world off the labor of 2 people in a hundred. And this is already, currently, true for nearly all production fields. A single textile worker produces more textiles than a 1,000 could have a century ago. Similar increases in productivity are true for nearly every field save for incredibly niche (but still important) industries.
Automation is just going to keep increasing this over time. We will never completely eliminate human labor, at least not while we resemble anything close to human, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have already dropped the 40 hour work week down to 10 hours (we’d still have more production than at any point in human history) and that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to eliminate work to the furthest extent possible so we can actually enjoy life; even if that enjoyment for people like you is spending your time farming manually.
Are you advocating for not treating the sick whatsoever, or are you assuming total governmental funding for treating the sick?
‘funding’ is a capitalist term, but yes a simplification of socialist and post-currency economics would be ‘the government funds treating the sick’… like it does in 109 countries, including every developed nation, and a majority of recognized developing nations except the US.
What term would you use instead of “funding”? Even if we ditch capitalism, as we should, doctors et al still need to get paid, and hospitals still need money to operate (assuming we got rid of any for-profit healthcare). We wouldn’t be doing this with a barter system, right?
Why would there be transactions at all? What use is money if you can just get what you need?
The idea is to remove, albeit slowly, all of the distrust-based systems in society as we grow beyond simple fear-based order.
The problem is that the base still relies on humans. Even in a perfect system you can’t eliminate greed. Eventually someone will want more than what they need and use violence to take it and the cycle repeats
Then we punish them.
‘Oh you can’t outlaw murder, even in a perfect system people just do that so why even improve society.’
I’m not sure if why you’re aggressively pushing the idea that I’m against the idea of eliminating capitalism or changing to a different form of government for disagreeing to a specific point. I’m trying to have a discussion and perhaps have my viewpoints challenged and yet often on this platform everyone devolves to hostile dunkage.
Aaaanyways. I just find the idea of no currency to be difficult to implement. You need everyone to feel like their work is equally as valuable as others, and also for people not to feel as though others are receiving things despite doing nothing for them. Yes working to have anything is absolutely capitalism but also if someone spends their entire life toiling away doing say plumbing and someone else decides to do nothing and still receives stuff that seems a bit asinine. I’m all for supporting those who literally can’t participate in the labor or you know having actual maternal leave etc etc, but I can’t really fathom obliterating my body while someone else doesn’t and receiving equal allocations. And at the point then we’ll food and water and whatever else you get is still a currency. Perhaps there’s a different angle to this though that I’m some how not understanding
You’re right that I’m relatively hostile and in general this platform breeds hostility due to the ideological differences between those that created and originally populated the platform, and reddit ‘refugees’ that disagree with reddit’s management but not the far-right ideologies so ever present in all aspects of that website (fostered of course by bots). Those with your viewpoint tend not to want to learn, and instead decide anyone to the left of burning orphans for warmth is a ‘tankie.’ That’s not fair to you.
To clarify, you have a transactional worldview, you assume that in order to exist, one must be useful to society. This incidentally narrows down the number of countries you could be from, as it’s not actually a common idea. Protestants, and generally former global empires are the two places you’ll see this so readily codified into the public conscious to be fed down to a general idea of jealousy of your fellow worker; i.e. you believe that all things must be earned, and if you feel someone is getting something that by your estimation they have not earned, you feel slighted.
This is a greedy and self-interested idea, but can be worked with until you limit the essentials. So I’d like to refocus on that.
In a normal human household, for nearly all of human history and human present, in nearly all cultures and societies that have ever existed, the family dynamic is the one least commonly likely to be transactional. You wouldn’t keep food away from your child if they failed to do a chore, you wouldn’t take medicine away from your grandparents because they are too sick to sweep up, you wouldn’t stop showing affection towards your lover just because the dishes weren’t done. This is a non-transactional relationship. Everyone gets what they need, unconditionally. Now luxuries, that might be withheld; that might entirely be absent; that might be a reward for hard work – but the essentials everyone gets, even if they come at great personal loss.
Now, one might say, that is just family, and that could not work beyond that unit – again we look at history and the present. In most societies, in most cultures, in most of human history the ‘family’ and the ‘village’ had little differences beyond who is a possible (and societally acceptable) mate. Human behavioral biology (free course btw) is an interesting field that shows us that we didn’t evolve to protect the clan, those related to us; we evolved to protect everyone we saw as a tribe – including those not genetically related to us. How and why would evolution do that? What possible ‘survival of the fittest’ category could that fulfill? In short (but seriously watch the course) when we take care of others, and others take care of us, we all prosper and are more likely to pass on our genes. When we compete we are less likely to pass on our genes. Because competition narrows both the genetic field and makes it harder for those that survive the competition to continue surviving. We are not polar bears who can go off independently for half our adult lives and come back only to mate; we are weak tribal apes that have evolved to rely on each other.
Now… that background out of the way;
Imagine a world where we extend that family unit. We extend that tribe. We have an essential set of things that all humans are entitled to, that we all work to fulfill. Luxuries, again, may be withheld or rewarded, but not food, water, shelter, or any of the necessary items we all have come to rely on.
But, you will likely say, what if someone is greedy? – Greed is primarily a learned trait, although there is a clear genetic component, most people are not greedy. Those that are, we could treat like we treat any other person that breaks the social contract; i.e. education, imprisonment, or similar corrective action.
But, you might ask, how do we know who is actually contributing? – And I ask, why does that actually matter? To alay this concern I would point to the mountain of evidence that people want to work, especially when they are not alienated from the effects of their work; but I would still ask why does it matter? Does your toddler need to work in order to eat? Does your grandmother? Again we should be extending the idea of the tribe beyond our immediate web of connections, and that requires trust. And through research we can see the trust will always statistically be well placed.
But, you might ask, how do people get rewarded for their work? What’s the incentive? – The incentive, primarily, is the same incentive a mother has to clean up a spill or a child has to help their sibling with homework. Not love or anything so immeasurable – but good will, the direct understanding of the good that work does, and the satisfaction of knowing you made a positive change in your environment. Now that’s not to say there can’t be other rewards. Not every job has someone that wants to do it (though we’ve all seen enough kink videos to know most every job has someone way too into doing it that they’d do it for free), and maybe there can be additional incentive structures for luxuries; but the goal would be through education and showing people the direct positive results of their actions that everyone helps how they can, when they can, as much as they can.
But, you might ask, about those that are genetically greedy, those that would ‘take advantage’ and try to hoard wealth? Well my friend, there are a myriad of solutions for that, again from education and imprisonment, to the good ol’ French Micro Press.. Setting up a trust-based, family-oriented (actually family oriented) society means there are still rules, and those that would tear down society for their own gain would be on the level of murderers and child molesters.
Crash Course, What is socialism?
The Communist Manifesto
Plato’s The Republic
Yes, we cannot eliminate currency at this stage of the game. But we can have democratic socialism, and universal basic income, and Medicare for all, and still have money, including more money for people who choose to work for it.
What’s it like to consider reality a distant and off-putting concept but an imaginary conception of society totally familiar and so doable it’s not even worth mentioning the process to get to it?
It’s better than pretending that repeating history and failed ideas will magically generate a different outcome. Pretending that we can ‘fix’ capitalism with more regulations or more reforms is silly when there has never been a successful capitalist country in history.
They, at best, have to adopt socialist-adjacent policies paid for by the explicit rape of slave countries and colonies just to survive a few more decades; with no actual plans for what happens if those colonies throw off their chains or how to ever stop exploiting people to survive.
Great, you get to just make up an argument I never made and run with it. My favorite.