Why do we assume everyone should be working?

> I was talking to a friend of mine and I asked this. She said “of course everyone should be working, I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff”

This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.

In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".

Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.

> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.

The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.

Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.

I appreciate this reflection. I'm not sure if we assume we need everyone participating in the labor market, that we need their active contribution. I think it might be more about "well, if they're not, they're lazy and we're supporting them, they're getting a free ride."

So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.

But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.

And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.

So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.

> does economics support that statement always?

Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.

Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.

We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?

To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.

"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.

Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.

> utilizing a resource to it’s fullest at all times is not a given

Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.

I don't think this is necessarily the assumption. The US labor force is less than 170 million [1], so less than half of society is in the labor force, and that includes unemployed. The total labor force participation rate (so we exclude institutionalized peoples, children, etc) is about 60%.

And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.

Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV

We don't assume everyone should be working. Some categories everyone accepts shouldn't be working: children, students, retirees, new parents, the sick, and the disabled.

There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.

> The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

- Arthur C. Clarke

Before that, a more important question is: why assume that buying or having "more stuff" leads to a better life?

In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs

> A politician should not need to hunt for job creating policies, and yet they do because admittedly the alternative is poverty.

This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.

Feels like related to [0].

Looks shallowly philosophical, based on "me and my friend". Equating "economy" to some small subset of white collar work.

Have to say world is much bigger place and there are other jobs than filling in tables in Excel spreadsheet.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232221

The definition of 'work' itself is pretty arbitrary. Someone writing for fun could end up being 'work' if it inspires some large change in the world. And someone doing lots of labor could barely move the needle.

In that sense, not everyone (who is eligible to work or looks like they are working) is working in the first place.

I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.

Because we got used to the idea that who is not working, is consuming resources made by those working and putting in effort. Then those putting in effort say "if I could get resources without putting in effort, why should I put the effort?".

> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.

Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.

Because empirically people are happier when they work. When you decompose work into it's constituent parts - there are a bunch of incredible psychological things (meaning, responsibility, societal integration) and not so incredible things (toil, labor, chronic stress). When we are not working we do things that mimic work, we just don't call it so.

It might be a net loss to the economy, true.

But to me it’s about you trying to contribute.

I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.

But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money.

Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.

What sloppy slop is that?

> Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop.

This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense.

> When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making

The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean?

> That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder?

Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff.

> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists,

There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour.

It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.

Then why Star Wars is considered a dystopia and Star Trek is considered an Utopia?

Great little read, and echoes a thought I had about how work ought to look in the future. There is evidently a ‘floor’ of intelligence now, and a plethora of people who are anxious about what happens to their jobs if the technology supersedes their capacity. Not to say that anyone below the floor is ‘stupid’ but it would be naive to say that people are applying a 100% of their intelligence all the time when they work. That’s likely true of some people, but definitely not the majority.

So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.

Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol

Is this a guerilla ad by anthropic ceo?

Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.

Here's a metric for all people that think redistribution will help: if you redistribute the consumption, you will all consume like the average person in India. And I don't think that's what you want.

As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone.

As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.

The problem is not really if someone is working or not, but that someone is able to demand that someone else works to provide for them.

If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.

How is this not the exact same stance that the far right has on immigrants and criminals?

Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?

Clearly he is not a socialist LOL

I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...

This ideas was last examined in Germany around 1930. They landed on a term for these "stupid" people, namely "useless eaters". Then they committed genocide.

UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.