[Iv]

In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

[remolacha]

The reason why less than 1% of the population can work on agriculture is because the 1% that work on agriculture are supported by highly specialized individuals that provide advanced farming equipment, weather modeling, genetically engineered seeds, financial products that help forecast demand and supply capital, etc. In a world where only 1% work, the supply chains for those things fall apart, and it then takes more than 1% of the population to feed the rest.

[astrobe_]

This is true but some of the technology needs to be done only once - the same way you only need to make a firmware once and sell thousands of devices. So a farmer today by him- or herself alone, does feed a lot more people than two centuries ago.

[pdonis]

> We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...

What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.

[Iv]

I am obviously making an extreme reasoning there. It is just to illustrate the absurdity of the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food.

Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.

We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.

[pdonis]

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food

I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.

I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.

I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.

Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.

[coffeecat]

> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

[chordalkeyboard]

> This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.

[ytwySXpMbS]

The grandparent of your comment suggested that unemployed people are shamed because they don’t contribute meaningfully to society, in that they don’t produce anything or provide any services. Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society. Sure, they use pension money to make money for themselves, but pensions don’t depend on that.

[CuriouslyC]

People want to feel empowered to choose. If there are so many options that choosing is hard, then it's just another source of stress. Research indicates that the ideal number of choices is four, with anywhere from three to seven being good.

In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.

[eloisius]

What the hell. How do you suppose energy, transportation, raw materials, fertilizer, paved roads, markets for distribution, etc. would materialize to allow for that 1% agriculture worker population to feed anyone?

[toomuchtodo]

Technology and automation. We’re arguing over how the productivity from those are distributed.

[eloisius]

Fully automated space communism has yet to provide automated self-repairing roads, agriculture equipment, etc. so not sure why we’d argue about that yet. The best it was able to produce was famine and the starvation of millions last century.

[toomuchtodo]

Humans will still be needed for agriculture production, but if enough people aren’t fed yet we’re able to produce enough food, you use taxes and benefits (EBT, SNAP, higher minimum wages) to fix the allocation issue.

This isn’t rocket science.

[chordalkeyboard]

> In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.

> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.

[zeckalpha]

40-70% is a wide range. How did you get that number?

[chordalkeyboard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio

Iceland is 81.8% and South Africa is 41.7%, according to the table on the page.

[zeckalpha]

That’s the total working population, not those who work on technology to support agriculture.

[chordalkeyboard]

its all connected through markets. The farmers eat lunch at a deli, they don't eat lunch at a special "farmers only" deli. The gps they use to track the location of machinery in a field is made by a gps company that makes gps boards for hikers, boaters, etc., not a special farmers only gps. All of these things are interconnected through the market and that's what makes it so much less expensive. The 1% of agricultural workers rely on the contributions of the other 40-80% of workers because those other workers are all relying on each other to support their efforts in a complex emergent web of dependencies that are managed through (mostly) voluntary market relations.

[taxcoder]

While that is an incredible number, have you factored in any workers for agricultural supplies and equipment, or for processing, distribution, or preparation?

[Iv]

If you count the whole field of agriculture, which would include most supplies producers and processing, you reach ~2% of the population (in France, I took my country as a reference, as I know it is a net exporter of food). I don't consider preparation to be necessary because if the food is free, I can wash the potatoes myself or even make my own bread.

[chordalkeyboard]

> I don't consider preparation to be necessary because if the food is free, I can wash the potatoes myself or even make my own bread.

Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread?

There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.

[Iv]

Oh yes, to be comfortable you need far more than just food, I agree.

My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Oh yes, to be comfortable you need far more than just food, I agree.

Its more than comfort, agricultural productivity relies on modern technology. Storage and transport of food relies on modern technology. Modern technology is a society-wide endeavor where many people contribute in tiny ways that all add up to something that can't be replaced by any of them.

> My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Indeed, labor employment to population ratios range between ~40% and ~80% nowadays.

> Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

I think the issue is different than you are characterizing it. Why would a few people work to support everyone else without getting anything in return?